BD 523 
.P3 




Class 

Book 

Copyright^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



r** ** 



THE 



Problem of Cosmology 



ABRIDGED AND ADAPTED FROM THE 
GERMAN OF FRIEDRICH PAULSEN 



E. Benjamin Andrews 



O ) t 



The Ivy Press 

Lincoln, Neb. 

igoi 



•> /I 



•^ 



* ? 



THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Copies Received 

JUL. 29 1901 

Copyright entry 

CLASS ClxXc. N». 

COPY 8. 



Copyrighted 1901, by 
The Ivy Press, Lincoln, Nebraska 



PREFATORY NOTE 



The following paragraphs are an independent re- 
production, with the utmost possible abridgment, of 
Fredrich Paulsen's Einleitung in die Philosophie (4th 
edition), Book I, Chapter II. The unbracketed foot- 
notes mentioning Paulsen all refer to this original. 
Following each such note is another reference, in 
brackets, giving the corresponding page or pages in 
Professor Thilly's Translation of Paulsen. The sec- 
tions of the Einleitung I have exhibited as chapters, 
except the eleventh, which, being long, furnishes the 
matter for two chapters. To induce and facilitate the 
reading of Paulsen's full exposition, his order of topics 
has in the main been followed. Also sentences here 
and there are mere translations from him. The body 
of the text is, however, by no means a mere translation. 
Neither the doctrine of the Einleitung nor its mode of 
exposition is closely adhered to, but both are freely 
supplemented or amended. The undersigned is not 
without hope that this compendious work may be 
found a somewhat more orderly, logical, and self- 
consistent discussion than the ampler one on which 
it is based. 



E. B. A. 



University of Nebraska, 
March 30, 1901. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



References for Collateral Reading 

Chapter I — The Problem Stated 

Section i. Definition; Sec. 2. Universality of Connection; 
Sec. 3. Connection in Space; Sec. 4. Connection in Time; 
Sec. 5. The Reign of Law; Sec. 6. Not only Order but 
Organic Relation; Sec. 7. The Mental World also an Organic 
Whole; Sec. 8. From Fact to Theory. 

Chapter II — Atomism and Paleyan Teleology 

Section 9. Atomism; Sec. 10. Its Weakness; Sec. 11. Paleyan 
Teleology; Sec. 12. Purpose Work in Nature; Sec. 13. Con- 
flict of the two Theories; Sec. 14. The Influence of Darwinism. 

Chapter III — Defects of Paleyan Teleology as 
an Interpretation of the Cosmic Order 
Section 15. It Presupposes Essential Schism between 
Mind and Matter; Sec. 16. There is no clear System of Ends; 
Sec. 17. Nor any clear Final End; Sec. 18. " Dysteleology;" 
Sec. iq. Individual Teleology; Sec. 20. The Question of 
Ends in History; Sec. 21. Conclusion; Sec. 22. Paleyism 
Persistent. 

Chapter IV — The Development Theory 

Section 23. Exposition; Sec. 24. Rise of this Theory; Sec. 
25. Not the whole Truth even for Biology; Sec. 26. The 
Theory Supplemented; Sec. 27. The Problem still Unsolved; 
Sec. 28. Conclusion. 

Chapter V — Mental and Historical Evolution 

Section 29. Language; Sec. 30. Its Origin; Sec. 31. Results 
of Linguistic Science; Sec. 32. Primitive Speech; Sec. 33. 
Morality, Law, and the State; Sec. 34. Philosophy and 
Science; Sec. 35. History, Personal and General. 

Chapter VI — The Impossibility of Atomist 
Metaphysics 
Section 36. Primordiality According to Atomism; Sec. 37. 
Cause and Effect, What ? Sec. 38. The Modern Conception 
of Cause; Sec. 39. Atomism and Causality; Sec. 40. The Re- 
sult of our Examination; Sec. 41. Rigid Monotheism the 
Solution. 

(3) 



Chapter VII — Causality and Finality 

Section 42. Closer Definition of Finality; Sec. 45. Purpose 
in Mental Life; Sec. 44. Throughout the Animal and Veget- 
able Kingdoms; Sec. 45. In the Inorganic as well; Sec. 46. 
Spontaneous Teleology; Sec. 47. Teleology not a Science. 

Chapter VIII — The World-Soul 

Section 48. Our View Stated; Sec. 49. Its Reasonableness; 
Sec. 50. The World-Soul Notion in History; Sec. 51, Science 
and Sciolism; Sec. 52. Objections; Sec. 53. Further Objec- 
tions; Sec. 54. The Universe Sub Specie .Eternitatis. 

Chapter IX — Religion and Cosmology 

Section 55. The Nature of Religion: Sense of Dependence; 
Sec. 56. Faith or Trust; Sec. 57. The Basis of Faith; Sec. 
58. Religion and Dogma; Sec. 59. Religion and Monism; 
Sec. 60. Continuation; Sec. 61. Prayer and Miracle; Sec. 62. 
Transcendence, Immanence, Dualism; Sec. 63. The Ques- 
tion of a Theodicy. 

Chapter X — Evolution of Cosmological Theory: 
Fetichism and Polytheism 
Section 64. Fetichism; Sec. 65. Polytheism; Sec. 66. The 
Elements; Sec. 67. Special Questions Touching the Genesis 
of Religion; Sec. 68. Monotheism: General Characterization; 
Sec. 69. The Progress from Polytheism to Monotheism. 

Chapter XI — Evolution of Cosmological Theory: 

Monotheism 
Section 70. Greek Monotheism; Sec. 71. Monotheism among 
the Hindoos; Sec. 72. In Judaism and Christianity; Sec. 73. 
Spinoza and Leibnitz; Sec. 74. Locke and the "Illumination"; 
Sec. 75. Hume and Kant; Sec. 76. Doom of Rationalistic 
Theology; Sec. 77. Schleiermacher. 

Chapter XII — Knowledge and Faith 

Section 78. Science Proper and Science in General; Sec. 79. 
Fides Praecedit Rationem; Sec. 80. This Tendency not a 
Prejudice; Sec. 81. Further Misapprehension; Sec. 82. 
Understanding and Reason; Sec. 83. Moods in Relation to 
Belief; Sec. 84. Externals in Religion. 



(4) 



REFERENCES FOR COLLATERAL 
READING 



ARNOLD, MATTHEW. . . Literature and Dogma: an essay towards 

a better apprehension of the Bible. 
God and the Bible: a review of objec- 
tions to Literature and Dogma. 

Darwin, C. R On the Origin of Species by means of 

natural selection, or the preservation 
of favored races in the struggle for 
life. 6th edition, 1888. 
The Descent of Man, and Selection in 
Relation to Sex. 

BALFOUR, L. J The Foundations of Belief. 

DuBoiS R.EYMOND,E..£/i?fo?r die Grenzen des Naturerken- 

ne?is; Die Sieben Weltraethsel. Two 
Lectures, 1882. 

GOETHE, J. W. VON. . . The Poems, Gott und die Welt. 

HAECKEL, E. P. A. . . . The History of Creation, or the develop- 
ment of the earth and its inhabitants 
by the action of natural causes. 2 
vols., 4th ed., 1892. 
The Evolution of Man; a popular expo- 
sition of the principal points of human 
ontology and phylogeny. 2 vols., 1879. 
Der Monismus als Ba?id zzuischen Re- 
ligion undWisseyischaft. Glaubens- 
bekenntniss cines Naturforschers. 
3d ed., 1893. English translation, 
Black, London, 1894; French trans- 
lation, Reinwald, Paris, 1897. 

HUME, D Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. 

Essay on Miracles. 

LANGE, F. A History of Materialism. 

LoTZE, R. H Microcosmus: an essay concerning man 

and his relation to the world. 
Outlines of the Philosophy of Religion. 
Metaphysics. 

Mill, J. S Nature, the Utility of Religion, Theism: 

being three essays on religion. 

Paley, W Natural Theology, or evidences of the 

existence and attributes of the Deity 
collected from the appearances of 
Nature. 
Compare Clark, F. LeG., Paley's Natural 
Theology Revised to Harmonize with 
Modern Science, London, 1875. 

ROYCE, J. [ET AL.]. . . . The Conception of God. 

(5) 



SCHURMAN, J. G Belief in God. 

WALLACE, A. R The Action of Natural Selection on 

Man. 1872. 
Contributions to the Theory of Natural 

Selection: essays, 1871. 
Darwinism: an exposition of the theory 
of natural selection, etc., 1889. 

WEISSMANN, A The Effect of External Influences upon 

Development. With annotations. 
The Romanes Lecture, 1894. 
Essays upon Heredity and Kindred 

Biological Problems, 1889, 
With these two works consult: Romanes, 
G. J., An Examination of Weissmann- 
ism, 1893; Hiller, H. C, Against 
Dogma and Freewill and for Weiss- 
mannism, 1893; Spencer, H., two 
articles in Contemporary Review, 
February and March, 1893, "The In- 
adequacy of Natural Selection"; 
Ibid., April, 1893, Romanes, G. J., 
"Mr. Herbert Spencer on Natural 
Selection " ; Ibid., May, 1893, Spencer, 
H., "Professor Weissmann's Theor- 
ies"; Ibid., July, 1893, Romanes, G. 
J., and Hartog, M., "The Spencer- 
Weissmann Controversy"; Ibid., 
September and October, i893,Weiss- 
mann, A., "The All- Sufficiency of 
Natural Selection: A Reply to Her- 
bertSpencer"; Ibid., December, 1893, 
Spencer, H., "A Rejoinder to Pro- 
fessor Weissmann," also ibid., Octo- 
ber, " Weissmannism Once More"; 
Ibid., September, 1895, Weissmann, 
A., "Heredity Once More"; Ibid., 
October, 1895, Spencer, H., "Hered- 
ity Once More: A Letter to the 
Editor" ; Ball, W. P., Are the Effects 
of Use and Disuse Inherited? etc., 
London, 1890; Lombroso, C, The 
Heredity of Acquired Characteristics, 
The Forum, October, 1897. 

ZELLER, E Ueber Ursp-ung und Wcsen der Re- 
ligion. Vortrdge und Abhandlun- 
gen 2te Sammlung, 1. 
Compare Andrews, E. B., in The New 
World, December, 1894, Science a 
Natural Ally of Religion. 

J a M ES, W The Will to Believe, and other essays in 

Popular Philosophy. 

(6) 



THE PROBLEM OF COSMOLOGY 



CHAPTER I 
The Problem Stated 

^ ^. ... Section i. Presupposing a world of re- 

Defmition. ,. . , rr ^ ° . , . . 

ahty or fact, however constituted in its 

essence, we proceed, in discussing The Cosmological 
Problem, to inquire into the connection if any subsist- 
ing between the different parts or aspects of the world 
and into the manner in which they form, or seem to 
form, a unity. Whereas Ontology deals with the ques- 
tion: What is the essence or nature of the reai? we 
here ask: How is it that the real takes the form or 
forms it does, constituting itself into a cosmos ? The 
inquiry is natural, since, so far as we can see, reality 
might have any other form or no form at all that 
would be apprehensible by us. 

_. . ... _ Sec. 2. Unreflecting intelligence 

Universality of & . & 

_ .. views the world as an infinite plu- 

Connection. ,. p . , , , . r . 

rahty of independent things, each 

one of which is taken as having existence in, by and 
for itself. Things indeed seem to stand in mutual 
relations one to another, acting and reacting, yet ap- 
parently without any intrinsic necessity for doing so. 
Reflection, however, discovers that nothing which 
comes within our view exists by or for itself; that 
what we term action and being acted upon, so far from 
bearing an accidental or occasional character, is abso- 

(7) 



The Problem of Cosmology 



lutely universal. All matter is involved in the system 
all motion, from infinitely far back, forms but one 
single, mighty, total motion. Every finite element or 
thing whatever is a correlate, and omnis determinatio 
est negatio. 

^ Sec. 3. So far as relates to the material 
world this reciprocity is emphasized 
by physics. When a stone falls we 
say that the earth draws it, according to the law of 
gravity, but the law is further to the effect that the 
stone draws the earth as well. Its motion is at each 
instant determined by the relation of all its particles 
to all those which make up the earth. Were the earth's 
mass smaller or were a single atom of it for the moment 
inactive, the stone's motion would be different. On 
the moon it would fall with less speed and force, on 
Jupiter with greater. Moreover the stone's and the 
earth's particles are all attracted toward the centre of 
gravity of the solar system. The total fact probably 
is that the system as such is in relation with other 
systems and these with still others out to the milky 
way and we know not how far beyond. All the ma- 
terial elements in space thus form a unitary system 
with a unitary motion, wherein every motion of a part 
is included and determined as part motion of the whole. 
So physics teaches and there is no reason to doubt 
the statement. 

„ .. Sec. 4. Connection in time is no less 

Connection 7 

. y. complete or impressive than connection 

in space. The stone, suppose, was thrown 

down by a storm. This was the effect of heat differ- 



*For the sense in which "connection" here and in the following paragraphs 
must be understood, see Sec. 37 and following. 



The Problem of Cosmology 



ences in different portions of the atmosphere, and this 
of precedent conditions such as cloudiness, precipi- 
tation, sea currents, the earth's motion, the form of the 
earth's surface, and so on to infinity. Had a perfect 
mathematician at any moment of past time, however 
remote, known the earth's masses and their relative 
positions and motions he could have foretold the 
stone's fall in time and in place with the same abso- 
lute precision with which astronomers predict eclipses. 
So of every physical event whatever. All motions 
throughout time are pieces of one eternal motion. 

_ Sec. 5. Everywhere in the physical world 

The Reign ° y • ■ ,-, 

so tar as known like causes in like con- 
of Law. 

ditions produce like effects, time and 

place being wholly immaterial. Gravity and all 
the general laws of mechanics, so astronomy and 
physics assume, are descriptions of the behavior 
of all matter in all space and throughout all time. 
Any particle could replace any other across infinite 
reaches of space or of time without the slightest change 
in the course of the world. This mechanical homo- 
geneity of matter does not seem to be intrinsically 
necessary. Not only is the reverse thinkable but, 
were material elements mutually independent, as ordi- 
nary intelligence assumes, we should positively expect 
disagreement, heterogeneity, impossibility of system. 
A science of nature, at least in the now usual sense of 
the phrase, could not exist, and there could be no 
applied mathematics. How can this majestic reign of 
law be explained? Can it be a mere happy accident? 
See Sec. 54. 



IO 



The Problem of Cosmology 



. _ « Sec. 6. The world is, in some sort, 

Not only Order . , . 

h „ . an organism, a hierarchy of higher 

Relation anc ^ l° wer > more an d l ess conse- 

quential parts, with due super - 
and sub- ordination. Thus our planetary system, itself 
a member of a higher system, contains within itself 
minor unities, the planets, several if not all of which 
appear as many-membered systems, having rings or 
satellites or both. Every one of the planets has its 
periodic motions, axial and around the sun. Each has 
its own developmental history, forming an essential 
part in the life-history of the total system. In case of 
the earth we can at least in outline recite this history. 
Of the earth, moreover, we know the inhabitants, and 
we see that these terrestrial organisms form hierarchies 
and a hierarchy quite in analogy with what we know 
touching the heavenly bodies. On earth, too, are 
unitary systems, each with its series of periodically 
recurring changes (breathing, digestion, circulation, 
reproduction) — phenomena which, again, in each case, 
are modified by birth, growth and maturity and end in 
death. Though itself a unity, each system is an obedient 
factor in a larger system — the inorganic supporting 
the organic, plants feeding animals, smaller animals 
higher animals and man. Moreover the cyclic pro- 
cesses of life on earth correspond with those of the 
planet itself. Generation accords, in the main, with 
seasons, i. e., with the earth's motion about the sun, 
life activity and digestion correspond with changes 
between day and night, viz., with the earth's axial 
motion. Lastly we have the atoms of the inorganic 
world and the cells in the organic, each a microcosm, 
relatively independent yet member in a system greater 
than itself and not existing for its sake. 



The Problem of Cosmology n 

Sec. 7. The world of mind like 
The Mental World that of matter failg tQ present 

also an Organic any unrelated e i eme nt. No life 

is explicable save in and 
through its historical setting. Every man is in a way 
an epitome of all the past. Lessing's biography in- 
evitably involves some account of Frederick the Great, 
Voltaire, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, of each of whom the 
life, when studied, carries us back to a great group 
of contemporaries and predecessors. Lessing's 
biography, in fact, could not be complete without 
involving a good part of the history of the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries, and this history, to 
be fully understood, would require knowledge of all 
the earlier past. No biography or special history can 
be written without a more or less arbitrary separation 
of elements, every period and every human life in 
reality forming a piece of one infinite and seamless 
web. As in the physical world so also here, all is in 
each and each in all. The mental world, too, has its 
ordered wholes of higher and lower: humanity, na- 
tions, clans, families and individuals. The history of 
each man's inner life is quite largely determined by 
his contact and relations with the physical world. 
Some erroneously consider it to be wholly determined 
in this way. 

Sec. 8. Seeing that reality exists in the 
a form of a cosmos, presenting a unitary 

y* and organic system of members mutu- 
ally related and through and through governed by 
law, thinkers have been unable to content themselves 
with this towering Fact or Group of Facts. They 
have asked how it is to be explained. How has it 



12 The Problem of Cosmology 

come about that the world, far from being a chaos of 
mutually defiant elements as would be the case were 
the logic of uncritical thought carried out, is a stu- 
pendous and imposing cosmos, each part, aspect and 
function firmly and kindly related to every other, up 
and down, forward and back, in and out, infinitely? 
To this inquiry three generic answers have been 
returned: I. Atomism, which explains the cosmical 
order as resulting from a fortuitous concourse of ma- 
terial or spiritual atoms which were originally inde- 
pendent. II. Anthropomorphic Theism, which ex- 
plains the same as the work of Intelligence proceeding 
architectonically, viz., bringing together plan and ma- 
terials previously existing apart. III. Monotheism, 
which proclaims unity as being the immanent princi- 
ple of the world. By this theory not unity but mani- 
foldness is the problem to be solved, the universe 
being not a compositum but a totum. 



CHAPTER II 

Atomism and Paleyan Teleology 

Sec. g. Atomism is the view according 
Atomism. tQ which ^e cosm0 s arose out of entirely 
unrelated particles, particles absolutuely independent 
of one another. Moving about in space these at 
length fell into those transitory connections called 
things and systems. Space, time, elements and mo- 
tion are the only presuppositions. Infinitely numer- 
ous and playing about in infinite space, the elements 
could not but originate, in the course of infinite time, 
all possible combinations. Among these would be 
plants and animals, which proved to possess equilib- 
rium sufficiently stable to admit of permanence and 
propagation. This crude theory, set forth by Dernoc- 
ritus, Empedocles, and Lucretius, has, on the surface, 
little in common with the atomism of modern empiri- 
cal evolutionists ; for these very plausibly derive pres- 
ent composites (living beings and species) from 
earlier ones. Yet in respect to the origin of things 
no empiricists of our day advance a step upon those 
ancient ones. 

_. ,, 7 , Sec. 10. As an attempt at fundamental 

Its Weakness. , . * . , 

explanation Atomism needs no refuta- 
tion. It insults intelligence to suggest that the hairs 
of a lion's skin, originating each by itself and in 
hundreds of thousands flying through space, all at 
once assembled upon the proper surface each in 
the socket fitted for it. Yet by this theory we must 

(13) 



14 The Proble??i of Cosmology 

believe to have appeared in this manner not only 
the lion's covering but all his other parts as well. 
A lioness also must have come into being in the same 
way, and this not only at the same time and place but 
at the right time and place, where proper climate, 
food, etc., permitted life. If all this is not incredible 
no possible propositions are so. Indefinitely easier 
to belive that an earthquake one day so shaped, 
chiselled and collocated some pieces of stone that it 
left them a Doric Temple or a Gothic Cathedral, or 
that the Iliad or the iEneid arose by letting millions 
of types fly out of a bag ! The theory gains nothing 
by following hints from Empedocles and supposing 
parts of bodies, like hands and feet, to have taken 
form first separately. Well does Aristotle teach that 
wholes always precede their parts. Shake atoms to- 
gether to all eternity, the smallest hair will never grow 
save upon the head to which it belongs. 

Sec. ii. To the old Atomism, so mechan- 

,_ „ , ical and senseless, Anaxagoras opposed 

Teleology. . . . t , \ ., f , 

the original and fertile apercu that the 

universe is the work of mind realizing ends (riXrj : 
"teleology"), a thought which in some form must be 
accepted if a rational account of origins is to be had. 
Anaxagoras's conception, after use by Plato, Aristotle 
and the Stoics each in his own way, became incorpor- 
ated in theology, whence, with various modifications, 
it has come down to our time as the popular philosophy 
of Creation. Far the ablest modern expositor of it was 
William Paley (1743-1805), whose Natural Theology 
(1802) had immense vogue for nearly half a century. 
The tenor of Paley's presentation is as follows: 



The Problem of Cosmology 15 

Wherever we find a plurality of mutually independent 
elements so ordered that their connection permanently 
produces a worthy and rational result, we must assume 
that the order has proceeded from intelligence work- 
ing with that result in view as its end (reAos) or 
aim. Thus a watch, its numerous and various parts 
so combined as to make it a timekeeper, would be 
pronounced by all to be the creation of art and pur- 
pose. Finding it, or any part of it, on a desert island, 
you would unhesitatingly say: Men have been here: 
some man or men made this. 

_, _,__ , Sec. 12. Everywhere in nature, runs 

Purpose=Work J . 

. __ . the Jraleyan view, we find results so 

in Nature. , ■ •, 

exactly similar to those 01 human pur- 
pose and art that we are obliged to refer them to the 
activity of a similar architectonic intelligence. Muscles, 
nerves, heart, lungs, and so on, are obviously combined 
to produce and sustain life, while each of these instru- 
mentalities is in turn a composite, cunningly arranged 
for the functions actually fulfilled. How marvelous 
a contrivance is the eye, with its humors and lens to 
refract rays of light, its retina to receive the image they 
form, and its automatic accommodation apparatus to 
let in always enough light and never too much ! The 
organ is not only adroitly located and protected, but 
made double to preserve function in case of accident, 
to afford instantaneous judgments of distance and 
relief through triangulation, and to give ordinary vision 
more or less of a stereoscopic effect. These wonders 
are to some extent repeated in every organ throughout 
the animal frame, so that the deeper and broader bio- 
logical research becomes, the more manifest and im- 



1 6 The Problem of Cosmology 

pressive is the presence of design in the whole realm 
of life. As an archaeologist digging among ruins brings 
to light an inscription, a sepulchre, or a temple, so the 
biologist from a few fossil bones reconstructs his 
mastodon or his plesiosaurus. In both cases design is 
the sole cue. 

- *«• j. • ^ Sec. 13. Strange as it may seem, 

Conflict of the _ , , , , , 

^ t . Teleology has never yet succeeded 

two Theories. . , . A . _ 

in vanquishing Atomism. Ever 

since Anaxagoras's day the two hypotheses have 
struggled with each other on terms never very unequal. 
Speaking generally, devotees of the church have favored 
Teleology; adherents of science have leaned toward 
Atomism. In full Middle Age, indeed, Teleology 
seemed victorious, but the great cosmical and physical 
discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
produced a strong reaction, which we remark in F. 
Bacon (1560-1626), Des Cartes (1596-1650), and, most 
of all, Spinoza (1632-1677). Eighteenth century think- 
ing, so formal, so conciliatory and uncritical, again 
exalted Teleology, especially since the world of minute 
beings made known by the microscope could not, as 
Des Cartes fancied, be readily explained in a mechani- 
cal way. In the first half of the nineteenth century 
Teleology appeared sweepingly victorious. Most 
scientists let it pass as a tolerable working hypothesis 
even if they did not accept it as fundamentally true. 
The triumph, however, was a brief one. As careful 
scientific research expanded, Teleology of the Paleyan, 
ecclesiastical, or popular type was found to be beset 
with difficulties only a little less serious than those of 
Atomism. See the next Chapter. 



The Problem of Cosmology 17 

_, , „ Sec. 14. Extraordinary life was im- 

The Influence ... 

, _ . . parted to the anti-teleological view 

of Darwinism. f _ _, , °_ 

by the work of Charles Darwin 

(1809-1882). Giving a plausible, largely correct, and 
certainly invaluable account of the proximate origin of 
species through natural selection (Sec. 23), this great 
biologist begot in many the conviction that life in all 
its forms, primordial and human, physical, psychical 
and historical, may be explained without reference to 
any but known cosmic forces, mechanical or chemical, 
the evolution of species being thus only a continuation 
of the process which brought forth the planets and 
prepared the earth to be the home of life. Mainly owing 
to this attractive and magnificent generalization, most 
now deem it wholly unscientific to refer any vital fact 
or phenomenon to extra-mundane influence. This 
resolute search for cosmic causes is most healthy, the 
soul of physical science, yet it easily induces a scien- 
tific dogmatism no less dangerous or disgusting than 
dogmatism in theology. The universe may all be one 
yet not all be under laws which are now known or dis- 
coverable by methods at present considered scientific. 



CHAPTER III 

Defects of Paleyan Teleology as an Interpreta- 
tion of the Cosmic Order 



_ Sec. i 5. Paleyan Teleology pre- 
It Presupposes J J .. . , • u 

r- ^. t ~ . • supposes essential schism be- 
Essential Schism . , 

between Mind tween mmd and matten Such 

and Matter a P resu PP os ition contradicts 

and confounds clear thought. 
How does mind lay hold of matter to impose thereon 
its aims? When does or did it do this, and where?* 
We never see the process in operation. And if we 
could witness the junction, the thought of two 
earlier universes would remain to plague us. This 
perplexity, glaring in Anaxagoras, is not remedied 
by Plato (6aTepov:ixrj6v), or by Aristotle (matter). 
All three philosophers teach the contradiction of an 
irrational element in the world, "the other," in Plato's 
phrase, which forever baffles reason. Even church 
doctrine, while declaring that God created matter out 
of nothing, still treats it as, when created, something 
foreign to Him, intractable, needing, that it may gen- 
erate order and life, a reapplication of mind in the 
form of design. One would expect that an infinite 
and omniscient Creator, evoking matter from nothing, 
would constitute it adequate to all subsequent demands. 
To one holding this view of creation the rise of plant 
life out of inorganic or of animals from plants ought 
to seem wholly natural.** 

* Trendelenburg, in Paulsen, p. 161 [Thilly's Tr. p. 156]. 
**The doctrine of matter as a creation out of nothing is one of the Church's 
deep insights, making God all in all. So, the world is but a form of ceaseless 
divine activity. Paulsen, pp. 155, 156 [Thilly's Tr. pp. 151, 152]. It is in the 
assumption of a necessity for special creation and for miracles that the Church's 
logic gives way. But see Sec. 61. 

(18) 



The Problem of Cosmology 19 

Sec. 16. While intelligence and 
1 here is no Clear purpose in nature are at many 
System of Ends. points perfectly conspicuous, we 

can not make out in nature any system of purposes or 
ends. The opaque places in nature are more numer- 
ous and extensive than are the tracts of a contrary 
character. Notice: 1. The infinite waste of life which 
occurs in producing one mature life.* 2. The destruc- 
tion of mature and useful lives through famines, wars, 
and pestilences. 3. Desert patches of earth, like 
Sahara; perhaps also useless planets. 4. The inex- 
plicable pain in brute life before man and in all sen- 
tient life now. The utmost to be said upon this point 
is that the pain in question is a necessary incident in 
the production of good. But this not only can not be 
proved but, it would seem, ought not to be admitted 
if the Creator possessed infinite power and knowledge. 
To explain the above and such infelicities as inci- 
dental friction and disorder is to admit a moral, or 
else with Leibnitz a metaphysical, limitation in the 
Creator's nature. The admission, in either sense, 
amounts to dualism. See on this, Sec. 64. 

Sec. 17. To what does the cosmic 
Nor any Clear system tend? We can nQt see> 

Final End. Without the assumption of a future 

state of existence no tenable purpose can be assigned 
to existence here and now. If one alleges that happi- 
ness is such purpose, the reply is that it is not attained. 
The same is true of character. Happiness and worthy 
character are the rarest of exceptions. And whatever 
occult end, if any, is reached by means of the present 



*Lange, in Paulsen, pp. 171, 172 [Thilly's Tr. pp. 165, 166]. 



20 The Problem of Cosmology 

system, that end must cease to be such when the sys- 
tem collapses. A display of power the universe cer- 
tainly affords, but to our view this is, so far as man's 
interests are concerned, fitful and without rational 
aim. See Hume, Dialogue vi. on Natural Religion. 
We shall find that a ray of light falls on the perplexity 
when, from moral considerations, we prophesy for 
man a life after death, but the Paleyans advanced no 
solid grounds for such an expectation. Their conten- 
tion was that our present life is by itself a rational 
affair. 

Sec. i 8. Certain things in nature 
y e eo ogy. seem i^e contrivances meant to 
thwart every rational, at least every moral, purpose of 
which we can think. Such are: i. The appendix. 2. 
The catarrh-sack in the human head. 3. The pros- 
tate gland. 4. Most animal pests, such as human 
parasites. Many pests, spiders for example, are 
wonders of design equal to the eye. 5. The superflu- 
ous cruelty of ravenous animals. We speak of 
"superfluous" cruelty, meaning, for the sake of argu- 
ment, to admit that ravening [powerful creatures and 
species devouring those less so, etc.] might perhaps 
in itself be reconciled with reasonable and benign 
purpose. Among the most striking manifestations of 
design are those enabling animals to kill. 

Sec. 19. Teleology succeeds no better if, 

n ivi ua giving up the anthropocentric point of 

e eo ogy. v { eW) we se ek to find in each separate 

form of life on its own account a sufficing reason for 

its being. Such a reason can not be made out in the 

case of animals or even in case of men. In very few 



The Problem of Cosmology 21 

human individuals can life be shown to be on the 
whole a good. In plants, whose structure also dis- 
plays ample intelligence, this thought of course utterly 
fails. 

The Question of ^ EC> 2 °* Tlie doctrine °* en & s i n 

Ends in History. history is beset with many diffi- 
culties: 1. That humanity at 
large is really on the whole better off now than at the 
dawn of history is exceedingly hard to demonstrate. 
2. If we admit that there has been advance it is quite 
impossible to prove that it is as great as it might have 
been — to show, i. e., that all historical events have 
been for the best. Thus, nearly every specially momen- 
tous event as the Reformation and the French Revolu- 
tion is considered by vast numbers of intelligent people 
to have been a curse to humanity. Observe that an 
event may actually have resulted well while another 
that was displaced by it might have resulted better. 
Common reasoning is incessantly in fallacy here. We 
can not compare the actual with the non-existent — a 
line of events which did occur with imagined doings 
which did not occur — so as to prove which was the 
better fitted to further the weal of mankind*. 3. Many 
momentous events, like the fall of Troy or of Carthage, 
the death of Alexander, the Turkish capture of Con- 
stantinople, and the Thirty Years' War, were appar- 
ently not for the best. 4. If we admit that, spite of 
appearances, all that has taken place has been for the 
best, we are still confronted with the fact of the infinite 
loss and woe which human advancement has cost. The 



*See Cicero, de natztra deorum, III, 89. Votive tablets in Neptune's temple 
testified to the great numbers of men who had been saved from death by shipwreck ; 
but no pictures there or anywhere told of the multitudes who actually perished in 
the sea. 



22 The Problem of Cosmology 

downfall of noble civilizations in Mexico, Babylon, 
Phoenicia, and Carthage, illustrates this. So does the 
fate of progressive peoples as by Rome's victories, and 
the continuance of barbarous and unprogressive peo- 
ples even now. Nearly the same difficulties surround 
the proof of "all's for the best" in any personal life. 

_ . . Sec. 21. Recognizing as altogether in- 

Conclusion. , . b , & .. 

structive and important the manifesta- 
tions of thought and purpose in nature and maintaining 
that teleology must in some form be true, we still have 
to declare the Paleyan account of it false or at least 
utterly inadequate. We shall find (Sec. 47) that 
whatever analysis of reality is adopted, neither nature 
nor history offers matter for a strictly scientific tele- 
ology. Suppose immanent intelligence, which we shall 
give reasons for accepting as the true view, substi- 
tuted for mechanism, the considerations which incline 
our minds to specify as cognizable by us the ends or 
any of the ends which the World-Power is working 
out, fall very far short of logical proof. But the 
Paleyan exhibition of Creator and creation as sections 
of being foreign to one another needlessly aggravates 
the problem. Dissipation of the geocentric and the 
anthropocentric idea of the world has rendered a 
mechanical explanation of the cosmic order untenable 
and absurd. For the facts which Chapter I passed in 
review some other hypothesis must be sought. 

_ , . Sec. 22. Spite of its insuperable diffi- 

r>3.1evism * ± 

. culties, Paleyism is still a wide-spread 

conviction even among intelligent 

people. Church teachers continue to expound it and 

most reverent people to hold it. Reasons for this are 



The Problem of Cosmology 23 

(1) that many if not most critics of Paleyism have 
been unbelievers, and (2) that this form of teleology 
is considered the only mode of religiously explaining 
the universe. But the latter assumption is groundless. 
Evolution itself as a method of creation is entirely 
consistent with theism. In any event religion can 
obtain no permanent support, indeed it must suffer 
permanent damage, by inculcating an untenable theory 
of cosmology. Witness the results of the church's 
attempt to bolster the Ptolemaic system, of its more 
recent struggle against the geological account of crea- 
tion and of its still continuing opposition to the 
hypothesis of development. Nothing nurses unbelief 
like this attitude on the part of accredited religious 
teachers. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Development Theory 

Sec. 23. The theory of development 
fcxposi ion. ff ers itself as a complete account of the 
manner in which all species of plants and animals 
arose. According to it, a small number of life forms 
being given, the evolution of these into the innumer- 
able species now existing is explicable through 
natural selection and allied forces, wholly without aid 
from any agency not resident in the evolving system. 
Among the individuals of a species one, say, has some 
happy peculiarity, as superior height, horns, teeth, 
swiftness, digestion, a thicker skin or a better power 
to hide, enabling it to thrive while others languish or 
to survive when they die. In the struggle for exist- 
ence such favored* individual succeeds beyond the 
rest in propagating its peculiarity. Its offspring tend 
to maintain this advantage in propagating, so that, in 
time, a new species is born. The old one may still 
abide, in which case, probably, the two at last so di- 
verge that interbreeding becomes impossible; each, 
however, going on to generate new species. It is 
usually admitted that this theory does not explain 
the rise of primordial life, while many evolutionists 

* Meaning of "fittest" in Darwin. Darwin admits (Origin of Species, ch. v), 
that the laziest and most clumsy beetle, which hates to fly, is often the one that 
lives, the bolder and really better being blown out to sea. The "fittest" here is 
the boldest and best which is not yet bold or good enough to fly too high or far. 
The same must occur in all species. Among bucks on the mountain the most 
daring climber falls and is killed or maimed, and a poorer specimen begets the later 
race. So of dogs, horses, eagles and men. Among the Jews during the middle 
age the fittest to survive were the least courageous, those most given to deceit and 
indirection. See Lombroso, in Forum for Oct., 1897, p. 205. 

(24) 



The Problem of Cosmology 25 

recognize other unsolved biological problems. But, 
it is held, the theory accounts to such a wonderful 
extent for the origin of life that we are justified in 
applying it universally, the assumption of any occult 
factor at any point in the evolutionary process being 
quite unscientific. Withal it joins biological evolu- 
tion on to geological, thus at once unifying and ren- 
dering intelligible the entire universe of cosmic form, 
the cosmological problem needing no new but only 
at points, perhaps, a little fuller light. 

_. - A « •. Sec. 24. The first who sought to pre- 

Rise of this T . . . . - 

_, sent a scientific theory 01 mechanical 

Theory. , . J. . . . . 

evolution was the French biologist 

de Lamarck in his philosophic zoologique (1809). In 
Germany, nearly at the same time, Schelling, Oken, 
and Goethe uttered many thoughts of similar tenor. 
Biological Science was affected, however, only after 
fuller discoveries in Geology and Palaeontology. The 
laying bare of numerous defunct life forms, necessi- 
tating amendment of the special-creation theory by 
hypotheses of destructive cataclysms and re-creations 
from time to time in the past, rendered the special- 
creation notion absurd. But, as expounded anew by 
Sir Charles Lyell (1 767-1 849), Geology set aside be- 
lief in cataclysms, showing that the earth has derived 
its present form mainly from the slow and regular 
working, through the ages, of the same forces now 
active in it. At this point appeared Charles Darwin's 
immortal work, the Origin of Species by Natural 
Selection (1859), followed (1871) by his Descent of 
Man. These writings seemed not only to make the 
geological record clear and to unify physical science 
throughout, but to throw an all but final light upon 



26 The Problem of Co sinology 

every main problem of sociology as well. All exact 
science felt a fresh stimulus. Biology in particular 
began to progress with a rapidity and assurance 
showing the influence of an invaluable new guiding 
principle. Going far beyond the master, soi-disant 
Darwinians hastened to exalt the new discovery as a 
universal philosophy, which rendered ridiculous all 
theology and religion as well as all metaphysics of 
the old type. 

Sec. 25. Admitting that Natural 

Not the Whole c 1 <.- u u ui u* 

_ . m Selection has probably wrought 

Truth even for . _ . „ / & 

n . . much as Darwin alleged, we can not 

Biology. , , . . . , 

take this principle as an exhaus- 
tive explanation of development even within the field 
of biology. 1. While natural selection may account 
for the survival of the fittest it fails to account for 
the arrival of the fittest. The rise of the fortunate 
oddities by which individuals become founders of new 
species it leaves a mystery. Yet these oddities are 
the very hinges of the theory.* 2. Many organs, like 
the eye and the torpedo, which, when matured, con- 
fessedly play a part in evolution, are the fruits of a 
progressive development reaching through genera- 
tions during which time they can not have been of the 
slightest use. The theory does not account for this 
their early conservation and growth. According to 
Weismann sexual propagation itself, on which all evo- 
lution of species depends, is in the same way a prius 
of natural selection* [save among protozoa]. 3. What 

* Weismann, to be sure, pretends to account for these oddities. According to 
him acquired traits are never inherited, transmissible peculiarities being always of 
the germ-plasmic or congenital order, the results of fortunate germ-plasmic combi- 
nations occurring in sexual reproduction. He regards the multiplication of trans- 
missible peculiarities as the great biological office of propagation in the sexual way. 
But as the theory thus carries all present differences between species back to differ- 
ences existing among the protozoa which, Weismann admits, were due solely to 
environment, the difficulty referred to in the text remains. See Romanes, "An Ex- 
amination of Weismanism," esp. pp. 23 and following. 



The Problem of Cosmology 27 

Schopenhauer terms the "will to live/' which per- 
vades all life, vegetable as well as animal, is an abso- 
lute presupposition of Darwin's hypothesis, yet is not 
explained by it. 4. In animals the will to live becomes 
a positive psychical force, as illustrated by the sexual 
impulse, and can not be reduced or even likened to a 
mechanical operation. So far as it is concerned the 
individual is not passive, like the boulders which 
churn pudding-holes in rocks, but an active factor in 
the evolutionary process. Here at least the animal 
and the vegetable world are separate pieces of nature 
instead of forming an unbroken total. 5. They are 
equally separate in the item of consciousness or sen- 
sibility, this pertaining to the animal kingdom alone, 
nor does natural selection throw the faintest ray of 
light upon its genesis. 

«,, ^. Sec. 26. To obviate these and other 

The Theory 

„ t difficulties in the theory of develop- 

Supplemented. ./ r 

ment various subordinate hypoth- 
eses, mostly suggested by Darwin himself, have been 
introduced. 1. The important supposition emphasized 
by de Lamarck that changes in the earth's surface like 
the rise of mountain chains or the formation of islands 
and peninsulas must often modify species. 2. The 
principle of correlative changes in organisms. Thus, 
if natural selection alters the teeth of a species, 
stomach and claws change to correspond.* 3. The 
presence of a psychical coefficient in the evolution of 
animals (see 4, in Sec. 25). In the form of sexual selec- 
tion Darwin recognized this, but Wundt and Paulsen,** 
after Fechner, have generalized the thought. They 



* Paulsen, p. 190 [Thilly's Tr. p. 185], 
** Paulsen, pp. 193, 194 [Thilly's Tr. pp. 188 and foil.]. 



The Problem of Cosmology 



suggest that the will to live, unconsciously operating, 
not only holds natural selection to its work, but occa- 
sions those felicitous idiocyncracies on which that 
process turns. For instance, the fighting cock's sen- 
sible need of spurs might determine special nutrition 
to the proper spot on his legs; whereupon the sense 
of need and the incipient eminences, being both trans- 
mitted, might, in generations, bring forth spurlets, 
which, then, natural selection would develop into 
spurs. This principle, observe, is in essence a depart- 
ure from mere mechanism and a resort to teleology. 
Observe, moreover, that none of these additions to 
original Darwinism helps us understand the beginning 
of conscious or sentient life. 

Sec. 27. Were we to accept Nat- 
The Problem ural Selection thus supplemented, 

1 n o ve . ag a su ffr c j en f- account of the causes 
which have diversified extant life, general cosmolog- 
ical inquiry would not by any means be answered. 
The following enigmas would still await solution: 
1. Primordial motion. 2. The definite character of 
original matter, enabling it, when set going, to take 
on determinate forms. 3. The genesis of life itself, 
there being no evidence that life has ever arisen ex- 
cept from antecedent life. 4. The birth and meaning 
of the reflective or rational mentality characteristic of 
man. The mechanical view of the world has no place 
for mind, than which a greater defect could attach to 
no theory. 5. The forthcoming of the moral sense, 
which is also characteristic of man. 6. The epiphany 
of great men. 7. The course of history. 8. The fact 

*See A. R. Wallace, The Action of Natural Selection on Man, where he argues 
that primitive man was highly intellectual. See also DuBois Reymond, Die Sie- 
ben Weltraethsel. 



The Problem of Cosmology 29 

of progress in evolution. Darwin admits that, on 
occasion, second, third, or fourth rate individuals are 
the ones best fitted to survive [Sec. 23, note]; and this 
must often be the case among all species. We should 
hence not expect progress as a general fact but this 
alternating with retrogression. 

Sec. 28. Even supposing all the above 
* considerations waived, evolution can not 
be pronounced true as a general causal law but only 
as a general formal law, as a statement of the manner 
in which some other cause has built up the present 
world. Evolution means that such cause has pro- 
ceeded by infinitesimal steps, creeping instead of 
leaping. When it is said that evolution goes on 
solely by means of forces resident in the members of 
the series or by resident forces conjoined with those 
of the environment, while the statement as usually 
understood is untrue, it may be accepted provided 
"members" and "environment" be taken in a meaning 
sufficiently rich, including, i. e., cosmic energy and 
intelligence. The wish to explain without supposing 
foreign, supplementary or occasional intervention is 
wholly just, but it can not be realized on the basis of 
a mechanical conception of the world. Any system 
can evolve only what it has from the first involved. 
If so-called primitive matter actually gave forth the 
present universe, it must have been more than matter; 
it must truly have been rich "in promise and potency." 
Similarly of each subsequent step in the process: the 
lower, simply and strictly as lower, can not have pro- 
duced the higher. 



CHAPTER V 

Mental and Historical Evolution 

Sec. 29. Like human society or like any 
*» ** * given people, a particular language (or 
language at large) may be viewed as an organism, 
presenting a vast number of unlike parts regularly 
cooperating to one result. The thousands of individ- 
ual vocables may be likened to cells, which, variously 
put together, set forth in its infinite manysidedness 
the entire body of a people's thought. The organic 
character of speech appears also (1) in the several 
parts of speech, noun, adjective, verb, etc., which 
correspond to the main divisions of our ideas, such as 
things, properties, processes; and (2) in inflection, 
by endings or by prepositions, expressing the various 
relations which persons, things, qualities, actions, 
etc., bear to one another and to time and space. 
Without speech to afford intellectual commerce the 
life in common of a people would be impossible; still 
more so civilization and culture. How language 
arises and how it grows are thus cosmological ques- 
tions of prime moment, analogous to those relating to 
planets, plants, and animals. 

Sec. 30. Language can not have sprung 
Its Origin. intQ be i ng by acc ident (Atomism). 

Hardly more credible is the thought of it as an inven- 
tion, like Volapiik, to which men were prompted by 
their desire for a joint and social life (Teleology). 
The latter view belongs to the exploded theory of a 

(30) 



The Problem of Cosmology 31 

state of nature wherein men were once fabled to have 
lived before the rise of society. One needs but to try 
and construe the conception to see its absurdity.* 
Did one man think out the whole, or different men 
the different parts of speech, inflections, etc. ? Or did 
many wise heads participate in the grand discovery? 
Each conjecture presupposes mental ability and 
reflection impossible save through the use of language 
itself. Yet the view of language as an invention has 
over Paleyan teleology the advantage of starting with 
the supposition of a known force, viz., gregarious- 
ness or sociality, the desire to communicate. The 
dilemma between atomism and old-fashioned teleology 
as applied to language seems at first view a radical 
one. No third hypothesis appears possible, yet each 
of these baffles belief. 

Sec. 31. Solution to the above 
Results of difficulty was well begun by the 

Linguistic Science. new view of language which w> 

von Humboldt, Bopp, and the two Grimms intro- 
duced, making it not a perfected instrument handed 
on from generation to generation, but a growth: not 
an epyov but an ivepyaa, ceaselessly evolving with a 
people's life. Languages are born and change like 
human beings, only more rapidly and visibly. The 
extant literature of Europe, better than any fossil 
record, reveals the birth and the death of several lin- 
guistic species, with no missing links. Note several 
characteristics of the process: 1. It is gradual, pre- 
cisely like evolution at large. 2. New speech-neces- 
sity, viz., the changing and enlarging life of men, is 
an incessant impulse to alterations in language. The 

* Paulsen, pp. 200, 312 [Thilly's Tr. pp. 193, 303]. 



32 The Problem of Cosmology 

need is partly for fuller, partly for stronger, partly for 
finer expressions. 3. Sense for economy in utterance 
plays a great role, preference thus arising for forms 
that are brief, clear and easily pronounced. 4. The 
choice is always purposive instead of mechanical, yet 
never formally or deliberately purposive. 5. Advance 
is not always progress and perhaps never so in all 
respects. Compare modern Greek with ancient. 
Most Romance tongues are logically superior to 
Latin, but harder and dryer. 6. Written grammar is 
a late, artificial, in a sense unnatural product, and 
hinders linguistic development. The same is to some 
extent true of all literature. 

Sec. 32. Primitive speech offers a harder 
problem, not yet solved, perhaps mainly 
peec . insoluble. Man probably began with 

the natural language of brutes. Advance beyond that 
stage consisted (1) in the articulation of sounds, and 
(2) in the application of simple or articulate sounds 
previously denoting only physical states and pro- 
cesses, as symbols of objects also. Erect posture 
gave man better production, range and articulation of 
sounds, while the liberation of his mouth from pre- 
hensile service improved his enunciation. How an 
explicitly human vocabulary arose: how, in Aryan 
speech, for example, "da" came to be used for "giv- 
ing," "sta" for "standing," "reg" for "ruling" or 
"making right," "plu" for motions of water, and "luk" 
for "light," we can only surmise. Many root names 
of objects and processes were probably imitations of 
sounds which the objects and processes made. "Plu" 
seems a clear case of this onomatopoesis; also "mar" 
or "mr" for the noise of a mill. Human actions may 



The Problem of Cosmology 33 

have been named from the tones often uttered in doing 
them. Young children's habit of handing out things 
with a "da" perhaps came down from a primeval 
habit which gave that syllable its meaning. The gen- 
esis of derivatives, of inflections and of the minor 
parts of speech we more easily understand from lin- 
guistic changes still occurring. 

Sec. 33. Morality, Law and the 
Morality, Law « ,-, / 

_. State are, like language, each a 

and the State. ,. . ' . 

living fact and 01 slow growth. 

Neither has a discoverable beginning, neither pro- 
ceeds from conscious purpose, from authority or from 
invention. Such ideas of their origin were part of the 
stupid rationalism which described poetry, art, religion, 
and every highest human possession as originating in 
human plan and purpose, as if clever people had in- 
vented and introduced these things on account of 
their great value. Similar rationalism is still incubat- 
ing to hatch the final education, the final political 
constitution, and the final religion. In fact, on the 
contrary, all law, moral or civil, at first consists simply 
of customs; statutes and codifications being later and 
more artificial. The state as the administrative and 
coercive aspect of society is likewise, in some rough 
form, present from the first. It comes into being with 
perfect spontaneity, wholly without the deliberation 
fancied by Hobbes and other believers in a " state of 
nature" antecedent to society. The purposed inno- 
vations having place when new nations or constitu- 
tions rise are relatively most superficial, and often 
work, for good or for ill, quite differently from what 
their authors designed. 



34 The Problem of Cosmology 

„, ., , Sec. 34. Philosophy and science, too, 

Philosophy D J r 1 1 a 1 

, _ . are plants 01 slow growth. As their 

and Science. . 

germinal form we may take the old 

mythical cosmology, men's first rough attempt at a 
unitary idea of the world. From this grew philosophy, 
which, in turn, after long cultivation and pruning, 
thrust out as branches the several sciences. The ad- 
vance was not excogitated or even outlined by any 
human intelligence, but the germs of knowledge 
budded and flowered by a sort of inner necessity. 
Individual investigators and thinkers wrought each in 
the dark, not seeing, at least beforehand, how their 
ideas would fadge with the general movement. 
Thoughts born in one man's head might in another's 
take the most unexpected forms. Mind still makes its 
conquests in that way. No one can tell what his in- 
tellectual influence is to be. The less a man thinks 
of contemporaries or of the future and the more ex- 
clusively he regards his subject, the more fruitful his 
work. Also the greater and more influential one's 
thoughts the surer are they not to have the character 
of planned discoveries. Newton, Darwin and Schopen- 
hauer did not intend to make the generalizations 
which immortalize them. Great, constructive, legis- 
lative ideas, when the time is ripe, come of themselves, 
as does an original conception in art. In mental crea- 
tion, such as science, religion, art, and criticism, only 
job work is projected beforehand. 

Sec. 35. No man thinks out his actual 

~ , . career in advance. Youth, always 

Personal and ' J 

General rationalists, build air-castles enough, 

but these prove to consist only of air. 

In early years we believe in thoughts, particularly our 



The Problem of Cosmology 35 

own, as able to change reality. All revolutions pro- 
ceed from young men. Age is less ideal, more his- 
torical. It reflects on the impotence and insignificance 
of individual effort and upon the awful power of tradi- 
tion, environment, and the course of events. The life 
of every historical people is like that of a man; child- 
hood, youth, maturity, and age are its stages. Also a 
nation's like an individual's life falls in with no man's 
plan but unfolds piecemeal and unconsciously. Even 
great men's deeds are but surges on the surface of a 
level ocean. Thus the same law of development which 
we have traced in the material world reveals itself in 
the mental. Organic forms whether in history or in 
nature arise not by forethought but by a spontaneous 
advance out of germinal beginnings. Growth, not 
fabrication, is the fundamental category of reality. 



CHAPTER VI 

The Impossibility of Atomistic Metaphysics 

„. ,. -B . Sec. 36. Although true, tenable, val- 

Pnmordiality , , , r , 

According to uable, and permanent as a formal 

Atomism ^ aw ' ev °l u tion, like anthropomor- 

phic teleology, utterly fails as a 
bottom explanation of cosmic connection. The post- 
initial structure of the world evolution certainly ex- 
plains infinitely better than old atomism, yet their 
utterances touching first things are identical: in the 
beginning independent atoms, from which all cosmic 
and living forms have proceeded. But the very con- 
ception of material atoms is contradictory and absurd. 
Does the atom occupy space? Then it is divisible 
and is not an atom. If not space-occupying, how can 
any number of atoms form a mass? To escape this 
dilemma some explain the atom as unextended, a 
mere point in space serving as a focus of forces. 
This notion perfectly suffices physics and mathemat- 
ics, but, when scrutinized, is found no more tenable 
than the other. A force exists only as it acts, and, to 
act, must have somewhat to act upon. No single 
thing, atom or other, has or could have existence save 
within a web of general being. The idea of self-ex- 
istent space is another absurdity. Also primordial 
motion and primordial relation need to be explained. 
Sec. 37. But supposing an atomic 
Cause and system launched, a further difficulty 

Effect, What? arises Starting with separate sub- 
stantive entities it must, to get on, involve the opera- 

(36) 



The Problem of Cosmology 37 

tion of cause and effect among its members. Atoms, 
masses, and beings must really act on one another in 
the manner supposed by popular thought. But under 
reflection this is seen to be unthinkable. A cause of 
all changes there must indeed be; but, as shown by 
Hume, real interaction between finite things can not 
be conceived. How, for instance, can a given atom 
or billiard-ball, being moved, impart its motion to an- 
other, seeing that they do not touch? Repulsion is 
really no less a riddle than attraction (Kant.) Still 
harder is it to conceive direct causality between parts 
or members of the mental world. The proposition that 
A influences B can really mean only that when A does 
a, B does b. Or, generally, what we call the opera- 
tion of causes producing effects simply means that 
given changes at given points in the system are always 
spontaneously accompanied or followed by given 
changes at other points. Effluences and influences, 
causal ties and connections, necessity and compulsion 
among the elements of reality are nothing but con- 
venient figures of speech, like sunrise and sunset. 

Sec. 38. The above view of causation 
The Modern ig that of all the most recent p hii OS o- 
Conceptionof phers The firgt tQ domonstrate it 

was Hume (1711-1776). He showed 
that the most trenchant analysis of our thought in 
contemplating the relation of cause and effect reveals 
therein no element of necessity, either logical, as if 
the effect were inferrible from the idea of the cause, 
or mechanical, as though causes forced their changes 
to occur. All that we can discern in the fact of cause 
is that whenever certain changes take place certain 
others also take place. Kant (1724-1804) agrees 



38 ' The Problem of Cosmology 

with Hume that, to our deepest scrutiny, causation 
means only regular concurrence or sequence in time. 
Not less emphatically than Hume does he deny the 
possibility of logically connecting effects with causes, 
or of referring the law of causality to the axiom of 
contradiction. Spinoza (1632-1677) taught that mind 
as such and matter as such never react upon one 
another. The philosophy of Leibnitz (1646-1716) in 
the same way presupposes the absolute independence 
of the monads constituting the universe. Their mu- 
tual relations are determined by a "preestablished 
harmony." Lotze (181 7-1880), Leibnitz's disciple, 
makes the accidental character of what we term caus- 
ation the main thought in his metaphysics. Lastly, 
the new science of physiological psychology, after 
long and most assiduous study of the brain and the 
successful localization therein of many psychical 
functions, declares invisible the slightest causal con- 
nection between the physical and the psychical side. 
Sec. sq. With Lotze we find that the 
atomistic view renders the connection 
and Causality. and reciprocity of things absolutely 

incomprehensible. If, as that theory supposes, reality 
had arisen out of many independent substances, the 
mutuality and harmony of their subsequent procedure 
would utterly defy explanation. Were each atom, 
each piece of reality, a thing on its own account, its 
existence and nature all its own without the slightest 
kinship outside, we should certainly expect it to go 
its own way, never troubling itself at all about other 
reals. On this hypothesis it is absurd to refer order 
and interaction to the "laws of nature," since these 
are nothing but formulae for the behavior of things. 



The Problem of Cosmology 39 

Far from explaining the riddle they in fact constitute 
it. The amenableness of nature to general laws ex- 
pressible in definite formulae is, for atomism, wholly 
inexplicable. 

Sec. 40. Again with Lotze, arguing 
f ~ from the fact of reciprocal action 

Examination. and accordance with law through- 

out reality, we conclude that the 
elements of the cosmos are not foreign to one another; 
that, instead, reality is an absolutely perfect unity. In 
this way, when we assume that all things are members 
of one common nature, the one single Ultimate Sub- 
stance, we can understand the consideration which 
each item has for all and all for each. There exists 
but one actually substantive being, God. All change, 
all reciprocity, wherever or however occurring, is his 
experience and manifests his causality. All forth- 
putting of force is his free agency, perfectly unitary 
and coherent, however infinite and various its forms. 
Things are his transitory modes, patches of " der Gott- 
heit lebendiges Kleid." See, on this, H. Spencer, 
Principles of Sociology, §§ 659 sqq. 

w^- .j »* ^.i_ • Sec. 41. We are thus led to 

Rigid Monotheism T , , 

_ , .. adopt as the only solution of the 

the Solution. _ r , , _ ' , , , . , 

Cosmological Problem the third 

of the theories announced in Sec. 8. Monotheism, cor- 
rectly understood and logically applied, if it does not 
exactly explain the constitution and course of the 
world, at least provides a non-contradictory idea 
thereof. Cosmology thus leads us to the same result 
as Ontology: God is all and in all. He alone funda- 
mentally is, and all finite things exist in and through 



4-0 The Problem of Cosmo/ogy 

Him. "In Him we live and move and are." This 
view, while differing from vulgar theism, has over that 
usual form of religious conception two important ad- 
vantages: i. It reconciles theology with itself by abol- 
ishing the contradiction of asserting creation out of 
nothing and at the same time maintaining the sub- 
stantive character of finite beings. 2. It much lessens 
the difficulty of believing in man's free-will, since it 
merges all reason with the divine, which it explains 
as purely spontaneous and free.* The true view 
differs equally for the better from Materialism. It is 
often thought that banishing the idea of God would 
carry also all fear of an evil future for man. Not so. 
If somehow the miseries of this life came without a 
God, how can we be sure that they are to end ? Even 
when all humanity's present life ceases and the planet 
freezes or melts, may not the same fatal energy which 
set going the life that now is place us in another per- 
haps less tolerable? If the system has reason for its 
centre and goodness for its aim there is assurance of 
its happy denouement in some way. On any other 
supposition there is none. 

*On Freedom, Paulsen, p. 227, sqq. [Thilly's Tr. pp. 221 and foil.] 



CHAPTER VII 

Causality and Finality 

^. r^ *. .^. Sec. 42. Rejection of Paleyism 

Closer Definition T . J . . _ , n . 

. _. ... is not the rejection 01 the "final 

of Finality. ,, . . . . __ T1 

cause idea in every form. What 

is insufferable in Paleyism is its sundering of the 
cosmical purpose from its fulfilment. We can not 
conceive of the Infinite as first forming or having a 
plan which he afterwards proceeds to fill out with 
reality. But purpose as antedating its result is not 
necessary to the notion of final cause. This notion is 
realized whenever an arrangement or movement willed 
by any being has, however instantaneously, the result 
which such being intended. Observe that, as finality 
does not include the element of before and after, so it 
does not exclude that of what we call causal procedure. 
Rather, it may be said, all teleological connection is 
or involves at the same time what we term a causal 
connection. However, the teleological is fundamental ; 
the tc'Aos always being, as Aristotle has it, to SOev 17 

KLVYjCTLS. 

_^ . Sec. 43. While every mental experi- 

Purpose in Z . \ , . \ . 

. t _ .. ence fits into a causal order, which, in 

Mental Life. f , 

one sense, explains it, the characteris- 
tic phase of mentality is its purposive activity. The 
form of mental work does not arise from any vis a 
tergo pushing it on, but always from some goal-idea 
leading it. A normal human life, or that of a nation, 
is no composite of amorphous bits of consciousness, 

(41) 



42 The Proble?n of Cosmology 

but an organic total with meaning. Every biography 
presupposes this, and so does every man in thinking 
over his life past or to come. Mental association 
does not proceed haphazard, by the mere play of effi- 
cient causes, but mostly in a way to evolve some de- 
signed result which the subject views with pleasure. 
Even in finite work, however, the plan is to a great 
extent executed as fast as it originates. The poet 
may plan now to write out a poem hereafter; but, as 
a creation in his own mind, the poem mainly origin- 
ates when planned and is planned when it originates. 
So with the orator, save that his planning and execu- 
tion extend through the delivery, not being at an end 
with any preparation, however careful. The architect 
may or may not incorporate his plan, but its erection 
into reality in his mind is a course of projection and 
realization going on together. Formative idea and 
the realization thereof are similarly contemporaneous 
in the life of a person or of a people, and in the whole 
development of human history. Everywhere are to 
be seen innumerable elements freely cooperating, a 
sort of esthetico-ethical necessity constraining each 
to contribute to the common end. 

' t ., Sec. 44. So far as concerns con- 

Throughout the ■ , ,-r 11 1 

... , scious human hie all admit the 

Animal and ... , , ^ 

. « . activity 01 purposes and ends, lo 

Vegetable •/ _ 5. r 

explain fishing-nets, lor instance, 
Kingdoms. ^ , , , . . . 

no one would think of saying that, 

being constituted as they are, men aimlessly make 

their hands go so that nets result and are thrown into 

the water. But planning is no mere human attribute. 

To declare man a mere piece of nature, denying that 

he is a realm apart, and yet, on the other hand, to limit 



The Problem of Cosmology 43 

finality to man alone, is most arbitrary and unscien- 
tific. If men weave and use nets to catch fish, spiders 
certainly do the same to catch flies. And if the catch- 
ing is purposive so is the eating and the digesting. 
All the processes of animal life, conscious or uncon- 
scious, must be interpreted as purposive, not only 
those maintaining the existence of individuals but 
also the instinctive ones like building nests, laying 
and hatching eggs, nursing and protecting young. It 
were an insufferable denial of nature's unity to use 
teleology in explaining the conservation of individu- 
als yet deny its place in the conservation of species. 
Thus forced to predicate purpose beyond the sphere 
of either human or brute consciousness, we must go 
further and recognize its presence in every part of the 
organic world. In its manifestation of design that 
world forms a seamless total, no domain of it admit- 
ting of satisfactory explanation by aetiology alone. 

Sec. 45. In the inorganic realm 
In the Inorganic purpose is confessedly less obvi- 
ous, yet in the absence of counter- 
vailing evidence the view, emphasized by science, of 
the world as one unbroken piece, demands that the 
thought be applied in this department as well as else- 
where. Living beings were not rained down upon 
our planet: they are its legitimate offspring, made of 
the same elements as the earth, children of the great 
cosmic-telluric system, itself, apparently, a work of 
art. As animals could not originate or subsist with- 
out plants, so plants depend on the soil, which chemical 
and physical forces have provided by breaking up 
rocks, and upon rain and warmth produced and re- 
newed by cunning and complicated inorganic pro- 



44 The Problem of Cosmology 

cesses. To all this it is objected: i. That the inor- 
ganic world is a congeries of dead elements — the 
conception of Atomism and of Paleyism. Answer: 
As we have seen, both Ontology and Cosmology de- 
clare this an absurd theory and bid us think of mat- 
ter itself as somehow alive. 2. That all things, pro- 
cesses and events in the inorganic realm are suscepti- 
ble of a purely aetiological explanation. Answer: 
They are so explicable only in the sense and degree 
in which an organ melody is. Notes, keys, and vol- 
ume vary as the> do because organist and organ have 
the physical constitution they have. In the same way 
an oration can be physically explained, or a Beethoven 
string quartette depicted as "a scraping of horses' 
tails on cats' bowels."* If, however, as all say, the 
meaning and beauty of the result in those cases defies 
physical explanation, the statement holds good for all 
nature, since nature, too, has meaning and beauty. 

Sec. 46. It accords with the above 
Spontaneous 7, • , , 

,_, , . that all men, scientists with the rest, 

Teleology. 

spontaneously ask touching all things, 

Wherefore? as well as What? and Whence? Find- 
ing the Wherefore category in ourselves we can not 
but use it in construing the world about us. No man 
is able to regard the various processes in a life or the 
different stages of its development as all on the same 



* See James's Will to Believe, etc., chapter iii, under Sentiment of Rationality. 
To the mere intellect the universe may be construed in a variety of ways each as 
satisfactory as any other. The intellect, could it act independently of the rest of 
our nature, would be satisfied with any view of the universe involving no mental 
hitch, wrench, or friction. Is there then no sense in which one thought of the world 
can be declared more rational than another? There is. A theory of it is rational 
(1) in proportion as it "determines expectancy," i. e., forewarns how things are go- 
ing to turn out, and (2) in proportion as it is congruous with our powers or funda- 
mental propensities, of which faith is one. To judge rationality by these tests is no 
more subjective or arbitrary than is the quest for rationality itself. In fact any 
merely intellectual apprehension of the universe is per se irrational and unsatisfy- 
ing in that it leaves unsolved the problem why there is any universe at all instead 
of a " multiverse." 



The Problem of Cosmology 45 

dead level of importance simply because they are all 
equally real. We exalt certain stages and results as 
the regnant and determining ones and subordinate the 
rest. The acorn is for the oak that springs from it in 
a sense higher than the one in which that oak exists 
for that acorn. So of tadpole and frog, pupa and 
butterfly, ox and calf. Could we see a planetary sys- 
tem or a whole national life unfold, we should there, 
too, in the same way, apply the notion of final cause. 
It is not necessarily the later stages of an evolution 
which we exalt as worthful. The ashes of a tree are 
not its end, nor is the carcase of a brute or the ruin of 
a temple its end. Our criterion of importance among 
the members is, meaning for ourselves as intelligent, 
aesthetic and moral: the fact being that we are inevit- 
ably impelled to try and construe or unify the world 
taking these principles of our nature as norms. The 
scientist as such, (laudably) seeking to arrange all 
things in an order of efficient causation, may in part 
overcome the teleological tendency indicated, but he 
can never wholly do so. The impulse to assign worth 
among things is an inconcussum of our nature. To 
lose it would mean the loss of personality itself. Ab- 
stract understanding alone could never grasp any of 
the predicaments which express worth, and under- 
standing alone does not constitute us human beings. 

,_, t t Sec. 47. After all we are not in con- 

Teleology ,. • f 

_ . dition to set up a proper science 01 

not a Science. , TTT r v , 

ends. We can not, thus tar at any 

rate, predicate this or that as the system's supreme 
end. In general, we have not overcome the difficul- 
ties pointed out in Chapter III. We allege only that 
a telic character pervades the world so far as we can 



46 The Problem of Cosmology 

see, and that cosmological analogy joins ontological 
theory in declaring such character probably universal. 
Teleology is not unscientific but only extra-scientific. 
It does not contradict the sciences proper, which con- 
sist in exhibiting the causal order, but it usefully sup- 
plements them. If it can not be demonstrated, 
neither can it be disproved. As science is the expo- 
sition of causes efficient, art, poetry, religion, and, in 
part, philosophy, are expositions of causes final, of the 
significances and values of things. They address 
themselves to the meanings of reality, introduce cri- 
teria of better and worse, set up ideals and goals, and 
make life worth living. If science proper is the 
priestess of truth to the understanding and as such 
ever to be heeded and venerated, those other disci- 
plines are her priestesses to man in the higher walks 
of his soul. All four, as well as science, belong at 
the altar; let none seek to drive any other away. 



CHAPTER VIII 
The World-Soul 

_ __. Sec. 48. The conclusions from the fore- 

Our View 

going considerations may be briefly 

summed as follows: 1. Reality is an all- 
inclusive unity. Finite things are not absolutely 
substantive but have a whorl-like existence in and 
through the Infinite One, the ens realissimum et perfec- 
tissiitium, whose more or less substantive constituents 
they are. 2. We are not to say "God is all," or "all 
is God;" God and Existence not being identical con- 
ceptions. God is the Centre, the Absolute, which 
neither comes, goes, nor changes. The universe, on 
the other hand, exists. It is God's out-put,* not God 
himself. 3. The Infinite manifests itself, far as it 
does so at all, in the two inclusive phases of reality, 
nature and history. Spinoza's dichotomy into Exten- 
sion and Consciousness was meant to express this truth. 
The two sides, however, are not co-equal in dignity, 
since extension itself is but a form of mind. 4. All 
movements and changes in the universe are so many 
direct activities of the Infinite, setting forth in a cos- 
mos of concrete, particular phenomena the richness 
of his endlessly manifold nature. 5. Being the ex- 
pressions of a divine purpose, these activities form no 
chaos but a rational order. The necessity with which 
they proceed is also rational. Containing in himself 



*"And God is seen God in the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and 
the clod." — Browning's Saul. 

(47) 



48 The Problem of Cosmology 

all reality, God is subject to no influence from with- 
out, still less, if possible, to any compulsion. As 
causa sui He must also be a causa libera. All rational 
beings partake this character with their original. * 

Sec. 49. To justify this con- 
Its Reasonableness. cepdon o{ an infinite; etemal 

Spiritual Life, whose fulness surpasses our utmost 
thought yet of whose nature we have a noble (thus far 
the highest) adumbration in man, we here recall a 
few considerations already presented: 1. The unity 
of the world despite the non-causal connectedness of 
its members. 2. The analogy offered by the reality 
best known to us, viz., ourselves. In us mind is 
primary and everything bodily has its corresponding 
inner phasis. 3. The very fact of mind, to material- 
ism a hopeless riddle and contradiction but according 
perfectly with the theory here advanced. 4. The 
telic character of existence, in biology overwhelmingly 
obtrusive, elsewhere the object of impressive surmise. 
We do no violence to the data by declaring life the 
goal of the earth's evolution, consciousness the goal 
of life, mind that of consciousness, and a rational- 
moral existence that of mind. If this is so, the further 
thought of a supreme Spiritual Life as the end and 
aim of all things is inevitable. No other possible 
conception so illuminates reality or enables one to 
construe it so simply. 



*We deny freedom of a man (1) when he is compelled from without ; (2) when 
he is acting out a compulsory nature of his own, received from God or parents. If 
a man were causa sui and dependent on no external influence, we should certainly 
denominate him a free being. In that sense God is free. This is what Paulsen, also 
Caird, Harris, and all the Hegelians, mean by God's freedom. The very deep 
and perplexing problem of a nature within the primordial being to which primordial 
and all will must bow they do not front. See below, Sec. 54. 



The Problem of Cosmology 49 

The World=Soul S =c. 5 °' ( A P hil ° s °P h y f e . the 

«.i ^. • u . ^ above, often with imperfections 

Notion in History. , . . , , ,.. 

and considerable modifications, 

has received the assent of the world's greatest think- 
ers, in the East and in Europe, in ancient and in 
modern times. Only a few philosophizing physicists 
have demurred. The best reflection among the great 
culture-peoples of Asia found rest in idealistic pan- 
theism. A related form of thought wrought out by 
Plato and Aristotle — reality a single essence, the ab- 
solute unity of the spiritual and the good — satisfied 
the Greeks. The Platonic conception mastered 
mediaeval thinking almost against its will. Modern 
thought, as well, wherever freest and boldest, has 
always taken the same direction. Bruno (1 548-1 600) 
and Spinoza (1632-1677) were led to it by the new 
discoveries in cosmology and natural science; Ger- 
man speculative philosophy was won over by the 
modern mode of apprehending history. In Hegel and 
Hegelism, where all reality was resolved into the idea, 
many thought they saw the final philosophy, suppos- 
ing materialism and agnosticism thenceforth forever 
impossible. While this proved to be an error, such 
reaction as has appeared since affects few save those 
who renounce as hopeless all effort to think problems 
through. 
~ . . Sec. 51. Comparatively few among the 

c, . t . cultivated at present reflect much upon 

Sciolism. , . * ,, , \ . 

ultimate problems. Most who do this 

soon land either in skepticism, owing to difficulties in 

the theory of knowledge, or in materialism based on 

natural science. Investigators of nature usually 

ignore or deny the fact of a soul in nature. The 



50 The Problem of Cosmology 

notion of a mundus intelligibilis seems to them like that 
of anthropomorphic gods, a fancy or a dream. They 
deem it superfluous, essaying to explain the world, 
consciousness perhaps excepted, from atoms and 
force. Science, it is said, has attained man's estate, 
no longer tolerating childish speculations. Influenced 
by the confidence with which science asserts itself, 
public opinion in educated circles is ashamed to own 
convictions not bearing the "scientific" stamp. Feel- 
ing the absurdity of recognizing a realm of fact yet 
denying its knowableness, some venture to assert that 
what we do not know does not exist, that what astron- 
omy and physics can teach is all there is to be said 
about the universe. Others admit a sort of knowl- 
edge touching supersensible realities, but deny it 
scientific rank, confining the terms "science" and 
"scientific" to work within the field of exact or at 
least of experimental research. In fact, science is 
simply a method of investigation, applicable any- 
where. To define it by its object is in effect to call 
scientific all studies dealing with those objects. But 
this is ridiculous. 

_, . .. Sec. 52. We proceed to canvass the most 

Objections. ..,..,.. , . 

formidable objections to the hypothesis 

of a world-soul: 1. A soul presupposes a nervous sys- 
tem. Reply: For aught we know suns, stars and 
planets may be the ganglia of such a system. They 
possess the same matter as nerves — carbon, oxygen, 
hydrogen, iron, phosphorus, etc. — have functional 
unity, and seem to form a rounded system. Their 
spatial separateness perfects rather than disturbs the 
analogy, as nerve microscopy clearly shows. Perfect 
resemblance to an animate nervous system we should 



The Problem of Cosmology 51 

not expect, as the cosmical body needs no means of 
communicating with extraneous being. 2. The 
hypothesis is mere imagination. Reply: Suppose it 
is so, though the statement is not wholly true, the his- 
tory of science itself shows that imagination is most 
important. Present hornbook knowledge about milky 
way systems, cosmic evolution, the structure of the 
eye and the motion of light, was once imaginative, 
ridiculed by physicists. How fortunate that investi- 
gators pressed on ! Until entire reality is explored 
bare guesses at the unknown are more scientific than 
scorn of speculation. Moreover, speculation which 
is consistent with itself and with the knowledge thus 
far acquired is scientific as far as it goes. 

_ ^, Sec. 53- 3. We are not conscious of 

Further . 

_.. .. membership in a World-all. Reply: A 

Objections. , f „ , 

part would naturally not survey the 

Whole but the Whole the part. A cell, if conscious, 
would probably not be aware of being merely a cell; its 
consciousness would seem individual and independ- 
ent. 4. The hypothesis exalts error and evil as on an 
equality with the True and the Good. Reply: Not so 
(see Sees. 46, 47). It gives scope for all imaginable 
differences of better and worse short of breaking 
reality absolutely in two and declaring evil inex- 
plicable. The charge made is applicable rather to 
materialism. 5. We can not mentally construe the 
relation of the finite to the infinite. Reply: We have 
the analogy of the relation which the individual mind 
bears to its component faculties and experiences. As 
our feelings, impulses and thoughts all fit together in 
one consciousness, so we may think the whole com- 
plex of mentality in the universe, known and unknown, 



52 The Problem of Cosmology 

as uniting in the life of God, yet no part losing aught 
of its several independence. The present or the his- 
torical life of a people is another analogue. Matter 
may be conceived as in last analysis resolved into 
mind. Or, were we with Plato to take it as defying 
mind, an irrefragable shell or casement of "other," the 
view would offer no greater difficulty here than in any 
theory of the world. 6. By this theory the soul can 
not be immortal. Reply: Quite the contrary. If there 
is a central, infinite consciousness to things, all that 
has ever existed is in a sense immortal. But more. 
Nothing forbids the belief that as our present pro- 
gressive blending of thought and experience with other 
mortals and with God in proportion as we advance in 
knowledge and goodness does not annul personality, 
so we may grow up and out into God yet not be lost 
in Him, not cease to be ourselves. 

_. ' . Sec. 54. To complete the Cosmology 

The Universe ,*.■.*, 7 

~ , . above outlined two further remarks 

Subspecie 

/Eternitatis are necessary: i. The truth that reality 
presents a Reign of Law (Sees. 3, 4, 5) 
does not conduct us to the deepest nature of being. 
The usual idea of law as fundamental is in fact not 
true. Every operation of law probably involves an 
element of free co-efficiency contributed by the Central 
Power. Thus, no two leaves are exactly alike; history 
does not repeat itself; we can not fore-judge a char- 
acter or a life from its antecedents; every great man, 
in particular, is an ultimate fact. Numberless phe- 
nomena are, from the point of view of law, so far as 
our vision pierces, utterly inexplicable. For all this 
our thought seems obliged to assume within the Abso- 
lute a fundamental nature which must constitute a law 



The Problem of Cosmology 53 

even to the will of the Absolute — to posit law, that is, 
as deeper than freedom. To this one can offer only 
the very unsatisfactory reply that ultimate fact may 
not accord with our thought. 2. For the universe as 
a whole, God and the world together, there can be no 
such thing as progress. Only particular and finite 
things improve. The conceptions of advance, better- 
ment, victory over evil, etc., true touching special 
phases of existence, involve desperate contradiction 
if applied to the All as all. Evolution itself is but a 
local fact. The universe as a whole can not evolve, 
but is the same yesterday, to-day and forever. Total 
reality is not to be thought of as rectilinear but as a 
closed, rounded, self-completing system — literally a 
"world without end". * 



*See G. Vacher de Lapouge, in his preface (pp. 6, 7) to his French translation 
of Haeckel's Monismus. 



CHAPTER IX 

Religion and Cosmology 

„,. _. . Sec. 55. Considered in its essence 

The Nature of ,. . . , ■ 

n .. . ~ religion consists neither in mental 

Religion: Sense " 

. ^ - assent to propositions nor in the 

of Dependence. , , . T 

observance 01 rites. It is an atti- 
tude, or two kindred attitudes, of the finite spirit in 
relation to the Infinite: the reverent sense of depend- 
ence on the Supreme Being and faith or trust in that 
Being as righteous. Man is a conscious cipher sur- 
rounded by reality whose limit he can in no direction 
even surmise. Infinite time had passed before he ex- 
isted, infinite time seems destined yet to come. Spite 
of his best striving he is mainly passive in the midst 
of forces and events, tossed, buffeted and borne on by 
the tide or drowned beneath it. "Men are the sport 
of circumstances when the circumstances seem to be 
the sport of men" (Byron). You do not create your- 
self or appoint your lot, and, however rich, great or 
powerful, can not prolong your existence an instant 
beyond its appointed span. Consciousness of this 
aspect of life provides, so far, basis for religion. If 
reverent, /'. <?., neither sullen nor merely intellectual, 
this sense of our helpless finiteness becomes a truly 
religious feeling. Part reason why brutes have no 
religion is that they are unaware of limitations. 

_,-..- ~ Sec. 56. Religious faith means a 

Faith or Trust. . . , . _ _ . 

conviction that the Infinite is not 

merely the Vast, Unsearchable and Almighty, but also 

(54) 



The Problem of Cosmology 55 

perfectly good, possessing moral character and gov- 
erned by reason, whose laws we can obey and with 
whom we can commune, gaining instead of losing in 
the dignity of human beings. It is a joyful certainty 
that reality is imbedded in the good; that the world, 
somehow, though we may not see how, instead of 
being a blind, aimless tumble of accidents, constitutes 
a meaningful and worthy order, that all things some- 
how fall out for the best, and that the ultimate motive 
at work in nature itself is moral. In primitive relig- 
ions this element appears as a confidence in the ex- 
istence of certain good powers in or over the world, 
able to ward off evil and to bless men with fortune. 
A more perfect form of it is seen in the polytheism of 
the great historic nations, believing in gods rational 
and just, in whose hands are the course of the world 
and the fate of men, who protect the good and punish 
the wicked. Then came faith in a universal and 
almighty Providence graciously directing all events, 
even the minutest, so as to compass the highest weal 
of all, establishing a divine kingdom where truth and 
righteousness should perfectly prevail. When not 
merely intellectual but joined with sympathy, this 
reliance on the power above is a religious exercise.* 



* Paulsen takes trust in one's country, people, etc., as an analogue to one's 
trust in God. A better, it seems, is one's trust in father, mother, or wife. This is 
better, too, than the one he suggests of a mother's trust in her son ; because dis- 
trust in one's wife or mother, except in the most flagrant cases of vice, is regarded 
as immoral. We should condemn a husband if we found him applying objective 
standards of character to his wife. We never think of doing this to our parents : it 
would be impious. Your mother (or wife) objectively criticized, may not be the 
best woman on earth ; but to you she must be the best or you are a villain. If the 
objective standard ever comes into your mind in judging her, you dismiss it as 
morally a poisonous thing. You entertain it at the peril of losing your moral 
soundness and balance. 



56 The Problem of Cosmology 

Sec. 57. While rational, involving our 

The Basis , , , , 

mental nature, and more or less express- 
ed Faith.* ., ■ . ' .. . , . , . F 

lble m creeds, religious taith is not a 

deduction from merely mental data, scientific or phil- 
osophical. A survey of the world apart from human 
nature would never lead to faith. It is a bent of mind 
and of feeling which men have slowly developed in 
the course of the ages, every generation passing it on 
with reinforcement to the next. Each of us derives 
it from devout parents, relatives, teachers, the Church, 
public opinion of the wisest and worthiest, who re- 
ceived it by like tradition from those before them ; and 
so on. Far from being a superstition, however, like 
so many false beliefs showing such tenacity of life, 
the conviction in question is solidly grounded and de- 
fensible. Its primary seat is in the esthetic, moral, 
super-intellectual department of our nature. A 
rational and moral world-order is a postulate of the 
moral law within us, which w T e find to be a radical, 
ultimate, objective datum, no less so than the physical 
universe itself. While, therefore , intellect could never 
from its own premises evolve faith, it is bound to 
recognize the premises thereof as fully valid when 
experience and a study of human nature as a whole 
have disclosed these. In thus not springing from 
mental grounds yet demanding mental recognition 
and treatment when found, faith is in no wise unique. 
All ideas and experiences arising in our sentient 
nature are of the same character. 



*See J. G. Hibben, The Heart and the Will in Belief, North Am. Review, 
Jan., 1898. 



The Problem of Cosmology 57 

_ ,. . - Sec. 58. This religious conviction, 

Religion and D u . & ' 

_ like all their experiences, men, being 

Dogma. . , . 11 1 

social, incessantly seek to express and 

do express as well as they can. Hence religious phil- 
osophemes, systematic divinity, ecclesiastical dogmas. 
Such statements are often of great value, and will 
never case to be made (Sec. 83). They are useful 
symbols of an aspect of our life which is too rich, deep, 
and internal to be phrased with exactness. But 
when dealt with as full or final utterances of the truth, 
certainly when identified therewith, dogmas become 
pernicious, incompatible with the fullest virility of 
faith, not seldom fatal to it, instruments of persecu- 
tion against good men. It thus appears that while 
there are better and worse among religions and 
among the varying presentations of a given religion, 
the essence of religion may be present among the 
devotees of all, and even in men who profess none 
whatever.* 

^ ,. . _, Sec. 50. From the above, religion is 

Religion and Jy , . , 

seen to agree even better with a mo- 
Monism. , . _ , 

nistic metaphysics than with the the- 
ology which represents the world as existing outside 
of and over against its Creator. Monism is not in 
itself a religion: it is only a cosmological hypothesis. 
But it is an hypothesis which seems faithfully to give 
back the impression that total reality makes, upon 
unprejudiced reflection. As it finds reality to be 
rational and telic, bottomed in good and aiming at 
the good, it can not but befriend a faith which has its 
life in these same ideas. We can not, indeed, ascribe 



*The Eternal may hear the cry of such as a father acknowledges a letter 
reaching him from a child too young or too ignorant to give it the proper address. 



58 The Problem of Cosmology 

to the Supreme Being personality, will, feeling, or 
other attributes, save as we, with utmost care, purify 
these conceptions from human limitations. The 
divine knowledge is not discursive : it consists in vis- 
ion. To the Infinite Ego no non-ego corresponds. 
Divine will can presuppose no unsatisfied desire, no 
object outside or beyond its subject. Divine action 
implies no contrast of purpose and execution, end 
and means. And so on. We scruple to call God a 
person not because the term means too much but be- 
cause it means infinitely too little. However, using 
the notion of personality simply as symbolic of all 
that is highest, finest, and best, and divesting it of all 
finiteness, we may speak of God as super-personal, 
and call the devout man's relation with him a per- 
sonal one. This is the admissible and unavoidable 
anthropomorphism of all religion. In such a sym- 
bolic anthropomorphism philosophic thinking and 
religious faith join hands. 

_ .. .. Sec. 60. Conflict between science and 

Continuation. ,. . , 

religion arises only when science 

seeks to exclude religion, maintaining that itself trav- 
erses and exhausts all reality and that the symbols 
above mentioned are but fancies, good only for peo- 
ple who can not think, or when church authorities pre- 
sent their symbols as exact conceptions and their 
articles of faith as scientifically demonstrable truths, 
calling on all so to recognize them on pain of con- 
demnation as heretics or atheists. Against a faith 
which vaunts itself as the supremely valid science 
the understanding is up in arms. Against a science 
which allows no room for faith, art, or poetry, the 
heart and imagination are up in arms. But a faith 



The Problem of Cosmology 59 

which does not affect to be anything more and a 
science duly aware of the limits to human knowledge 
are perfectly compatible, both having place within 
the great Kingdom of Truth. 

Sec. 61. That prayer may have sub- 

jective results all admit (i); and, in 
and iviiracie. _ . . , 

the light of recent psychology, object- 
ive results, too, in persons other than the supplicant, 
so far as regards their mental states, are not incredi- 
ble (ii). Nor is it absurd causally to connect with 
prayer modifications in the order of nature which to 
us seem even miraculous (iii). An effect belonging 
in either of these three classes would justly be deemed 
an answer to prayer, since it would arise from the 
operation of a divine order. Philosophy can not de- 
clare an alleged occurrence impossible simply because 
it has no known parallel, for our knowledge of normal 
realityitself is narrowly limited. Anyalleged occurrence 
whatever, as parthenogenesis or life from the dead, is 
perfectly credible when duly vouched. But neither 
philosophy nor instructed piety can expect, in answer 
to prayer or otherwise, any occurrences, phenomena, 
or modification of the usual course, which could, from 
God's point of view, be or appear miraculous. Such 
an expectation would imply an afterthought, imperfec- 
tion of plan, or faulty execution. Reverent and care- 
ful thought of the world leads one not only not to 
expect but not to desire miracles. As an immediate 
manifestation of its Author's will the world must be 
good. The essence of all true prayer is : Not my will 
but God's be done. It were arrogant in me to wish 
this or that in nature changed because it distresses me. 



60 The Problem of Cosmology 

_ , Sec. 62. Philosophical theism does 

Transcendence, , _ 3 f 

_ not deny God s transcendence. 

Immanence, _ , / 

^ t . (jrod and nature are not contermm- 

Dualism. 

ous notions (bee. 48). They dif- 
fer quantitatively, since nature is finite, a drop in the 
ocean of reality, while God is infinite. It is exhausted 
in Him but He is not exhausted in it. They also dif- 
fer qualitatively. The nature of things is at no point 
foreign to God but, as spiritual, His being reaches be- 
yond and rises above time, space, matter, extension, 
body and all other categories of nature whatever. A 
view which is cautious about ascribing to God human 
attributes and faculties must be less in danger of 
identifying Him with his works than one habitually 
anthropomorphist. By its anthropomorphism ordinary 
theology jeopardizes the doctrine of God's transcend- 
ence: in another way it denies his immanence, teach- 
ing downright dualism. If God created all things 
out of nothing they are and remain his work, and 
every effort to explain evil as of creaturely origin is 
abortive. Touching metaphysical evil this is clear, 
and it is hardly less so of moral. If moral evil first 
appeared in the act of a man's or an angel's will, we 
must locate the cause of such act in the being's nature 
and environment, whence the responsibility inevitably 
goes back to the ultimate cause of all. Clearly here 
is a terrible obstacle in the way of a theodicy but it is 
better to admit and face it. 

_, _ .. Sec. 63. The facts of life do not at 

The Question . , _ , 

^ ,. once point to weal as the final 

of a Theodicy. . , . ~ 

cause of things. Can pain, so 

ubiquitous, be reconciled with benevolence as the sov- 
ereign motive for creation, supposing the Creator 



The Problem of Cosmology 61 

infinite in power? Answer were no easier could we, 
as we can not, either (i) deny freedom, so reducing 
moral evil to metaphysical, or (2) trace all pain to sin, 
so reducing metaphysical evil to moral. Some light 
comes if, regarding Character as God's end in crea- 
tion, occasioning the highest good conceivable or pos- 
sible, we consider: 1. That the world's moral evil has 
all sprung from misuse of that freedom on which 
character, and so, supreme weal, absolutely depends. 
2. That the world's metaphysical evil is in part and 
perhaps wholly an inevitable incident of finiteness, in 
part and perhaps wholly of service in building char- 
acter. 3. That the concurrent realization of all the 
events which are, each by itself, desirable, is in the 
nature of things impossible. The last supposition, it 
may be said, does not limit omnipotence, this mean- 
ing only the power to do whatever can be done. The 
above thoughts offer the best theodicy ever yet 
framed, but it can not be called satisfactory. See 
Chapter 111, passim. 



CHAPTER X 

Evolution of Cosmological Theory: Fetichism and 
Polytheism 

_, .. , . Sec. 64. Fetichism is the earliest of the 

Fetichism. T 

three generic stages usually recognized 

in the evolution of belief in a Supreme Being, this 
leading to Polytheism and Polytheism to Monothe- 
ism. The history of that evolution, revealing mono- 
theism as the goal of all cosmological thought, con- 
firms the argument hitherto presented. Fetichism 
(spiritism, animism, naturism) is the faith of all unde- 
veloped peoples like those of Northern Asia, Central 
Africa, and Oceanica. In the same way as polythe- 
ism and monotheism it asserts a supersensuous power 
manifesting itself in the sensuous world. A fetich 
(Portuguese "feitico," an amulet or idol) is some rude 
image, stone, bone, or cluster of weeds or of hair, in 
which a magical presence is supposed, for the time, to 
reside, whose aid can be invoked by offerings of food 
and drinks. While the system doubtless tends to 
the identification of fetich with divinity, there is evi- 
dence that such identification is in fact rarely com- 
plete. Usually not the fetich but the divinity is wor- 
shipped. The choice and use of fetiches gives 
occupation to a magician-priesthood, Shamanism thus 
always going with fetichism. Animals, trees, moun- 
tains, streams, lakes, the sea, the sun, and the moon 
are looked upon as the seats of spirits and addressed 
in acts of devotion. The worship of ancestors also 
forms part of religion at this stage, while here and 
there a devotee has surmises of gods and of one God, 
Maker of heaven and earth. 

(62) 



The Problem of Cosmology 63 

_ . ^ . Sec. 65. Next comes polytheism. In 

Polytheism. r / 

this, instead 01 vague, transitory, 

nameless and formless incorporations of magical 
powers, we find personal gods and goddesses con- 
ceived as permanent historical beings each with a 
definite nature. The Greek system of divinities best 
exemplifies this. Here each god had his well-defined 
character, bodily and spiritual, which he never laid 
aside. The traits are those of human nature only ex- 
alted and without the limits of space, time, causality 
and mortality which prevail in men's estate. The 
gods enjoy perpetual youth. Without being almighty 
they will and it is done, no human or material aid in- 
tervening. Polytheism is during their early history 
the religion of all historical peoples: Greeks, Romans, 
Egyptians, Semites, Germans and Slavs. The old 
inhabitants of Mexico and Peru who had entered 
upon an historical life were also at the polytheistic 
level of religious development. As fetichism mirrors 
the vague phantasy-existence of natural men, with no 
clear thoughts, memories, goals, or ideals, so polythe- 
ism is the outcome of a settled condition, community 
life, orderly and connected thought. Along with a 
people its gods also become localized, so that side by 
side with the Capitol or the Prytanaeum rise temples, 
where gods permanently reside. 

._,, _. Sec. 66. More closely studied, each 

The Elements. , . , _ . . .. 

god m polytheism is discovered to 

present one or more of three personifications: 1. Deities 
are often viewed mainly or exclusively as personified 
magical powers. Here we see the tie connecting 
polytheism with fetichism. Popular religion, which 
is expressed in worship, not in mythology, everywhere 



64 The Problem of Cosmology 

gives this phase the chief emphasis. Health, wealth, 
fortune, bountiful harvests, victory, knowledge of the 
future — these and such were the blessings which be- 
lievers sought of their gods. Hence, always, the 
priesthood, with its magical ceremonies and formulas 
and its knack of persuading the gods, all obvious rem- 
nants of fetichism. 2. The gods were to a great ex- 
tent personified forces of nature. Zeus was the 
bright heaven, the power of the sky, manifest in the 
weather, especially in lightning and thunder. Dem- 
eter was the fruitful earth, Poseidon the sea-deity; 
and so on. This was the aspect of divinity with 
which mythology dealt, as religion concerned itself 
with the supernatural in its immediate relation to 
human welfare. Quite analogous is the relation of 
religion and theology to-day. 3. The gods were to a 
great extent personified ideals, presenting to a peo- 
ple's eyes in concrete form its own ideas of human 
perfection. Zeus was the model of man as a ruler, 
exhibiting worth and power as based on might and 
right. Apollo, whom the Muses served, embodied 
the idea so cherished by the Greeks, of high, free, vic- 
torious mentality. So Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite 
were types, in various directions, of feminine per- 
fection. 

_ . , _ A . Sec. 67. Two questions have 

Special Questions , , ,. 

_ . . A% _ been much discussed: 1. Has 

Touching the Gen= . . , . . , , 

. _ ,. . fetichism invariably preceded 

esis of Religion. , , . ... 

polytheism, or is it sometimes or 

always produced by the decadence of polytheism or 
of monotheism? Cases of decadence, like what Max 
Muller ascribes to the Hindoos, may have been fre- 
quent. Still, as we can not prove that any belief 



The Problem of Cosmology 65 

higher than fetichism has ever been primordial, we 
seem bound by the general law of human evolution to 
regard the simplest and rudest form of religion as the 
earliest. 2. How did belief in specific and particular 
deities arise? Answers: 1. Peschel and others refer 
the first belief in gods to men's theoretical necessity 
of finding causes for the changes which they continu- 
ally observe. 2. Feuerbach and others, after Hume, 
Spinoza and Hobbes, connect the same with man's 
felt practical need of aid from superior powers. 3. 
H. Spencer makes the veneration of ancestors the 
root of all religion. Substantially considered, these 
views do not seem to be contradictory but mutually 
supplementary. Search for cosmic causes must have 
begun early, yet can not have gone far without coop- 
eration from man's sense of weakness and need, while 
the agency of the two impulses in working out the 
idea of personal supernatural causes and helpers may 
easily have been belief — occasioned by dreams — in 
the continued existence of dead friends, heroes, and 
kings. Primitive worship seems to have consisted 
everywhere in the invocation of departed spirits to 
partake of food with the living; yet we can not with 
Spencer consider Zeus and Demeter, Apollo and Arte- 
mis, Indra and Rudra, Mithra and Varuna to have 
been merely deified kings and queens. When the 
category of spirits has once arisen the spirit-world 
may be peopled by the play of various faculties under 
all sorts of impulses. 

__, ... . _ . Sec 68. Monotheism is the 

Monotheism: General . 

~. . .. form of religion prevalent 

Characterization. . r 

among all historic peoples at 

an advanced grade of culture. All the great mono- 



66 The Problem of Cosmology 

theistic religions have arisen within historic times and 
through historic personalities. Another peculiarity 
which they show is their spiritualizing of the divine. 
They lay aside the sensuous attributes of the polythe- 
istic divinities, making Deity incorporeal, inapprehen- 
sible by the sensuous imagination. Thus, in princi- 
ple if not in popular conception, is given up the whole 
anthropomorphic enrobing of the supersensuous world, 
also the notion of God as a particular existence under 
law to time and space. God becomes the Being, the 
sole substance, whose essence and power permeate 
all spaces, times and things. Nationality in religion 
also passes away: God is the only living and true; 
there can be no other god. All monotheistic religions 
accordingly undertake international propaganda, 
which polytheism never did. The Greeks and 
Romans, indeed, carried their gods abroad, yet with- 
out thought of forcing foreigners to worship them. 

_. _ . Sec. 6q. So far as relates to the 

The Progress from * 

_ , A , . . Greek world, we can to a goodly 

Polytheism to ' ? \ 

„ A - . extent trace the evolution of 

Monotheism. . . . , . . 

monotheism out of polytheism. 

Polytheism yielded in part to considerations of ad- 
vancing morality. It was seen that if the gods were 
the founders of order, protecting goodness, righteous- 
ness and truth, much that tradition and myth ascribed 
to them must be untrue. By 500 B. C, thanks to the 
influence of priests, philosophers, poets and artists, 
the Greeks had outgrown not only the magical and 
the more coarsely anthropomorphic elements of their 
old faith, but as well the belief in those enmities and 
moral discords among their gods so familiar in Homer. 
The good and right was felt to be necessarily one — a 



The Problem of Cosmology 67 

notion which, from Herodotus on, found expression 
in to Oeiov, "the divine." A refined polytheism, how- 
ever, being still morally possible, remained, and 
would have proved permanent but for metaphysical 
speculation with its clearer and clearer apercu of the 
unity of reality, and positive science with its relent- 
less investigation and criticism. To an age enthusi- 
astic for zoology, botany, anatomy and physiology the 
gods of Olympus could be nothing but creatures of 
fable. 



CHAPTER XI 

Evolution of Cosmological Theory: Monotheism 

c . Section 70. On renouncing poly- 

., .« . theism, cosmological thought at once 

Monotheism. ' ° ,. . 

struck out in the two directions fol- 
lowed ever since, that of materialistic atomism first 
developed by Democritus, and that of idealistic 
monism first developed by Plato. This latter soon 
won the upper hand. Impressed with the order 
patent in nature, specially in the starry heavens, and 
with the moral order observable in society and in- 
sisted upon by conscience, Plato was led to his idea- 
theory, which exhibits reality as nothing but a unitary 
system of permanent and agreeing thoughts. The 
truth of the world is not what our senses apprehend 
in time and space, separation, rise and decay, but only 
its thought-content. Reality is the Koafxos votjtos, the 
mundus intelligibilis, and this, spite of its diversity in 
detail, is a perfect unity. Moreover, as existence for 
thought must consist in being thought (esse-percipi), 
and as finite thought can not grasp the vast total of 
Reality, Reality itself was pronounced conscious. 
The living, self-sufficing Cosmic Thought, containing 
in itself infinite wealth of subordinate determinations, 
was thus God, all-efficient and perfectly good. Though 
variously expounded afterwards, this Platonic view 
was in essence maintained by Aristotle, the Stoics, and 
the New-Platonists. As presented (best) by Aristotle, 
it formed a very consistent monotheism; only his 
"matter," the same as Plato's "other" or fit] ov, always 

(68) 



The Problem of Cosmology 69 

proved an irreducible, inexplicable element. The 
same difficulty in one form or another has dogged all 
attempts at systematic cosmology ever since. 

., . Sec. 71. Not dissimilar was the course 
Monotheism ,.*.,„. , 

. A1 01 cosmological reflection in the great 

Among the , , * , A 

__. , eastern branch 01 the Aryan race. 

Hindoos. . _ , . ■ i 

Surrendering to creative fancy the 

Hindoo mind first, in the Devas, made for itself a 
world of eternal, light-giving gods, to which philo- 
sophic thought subsequently denied all reality. While 
still retained in the popular religion, the deities were 
to thinkers nothing but forms and names ascribed to 
Brahman, the sole absolute Self of the world. Brah- 
man is the supersensible, self-existent all-spirit, sex- 
less and transcending individuality. Our souls 
manifest it, but only in limited, broken, and sensuous 
forms. "The atman, the self in thee, is in truth Brah- 
man, from which thou wast for a time estranged by 
birth or death; but it will assume thee into itself 
again as soon as thou comest to it and to thyself." 
The retention by the Hindoos, to answer popular 
religious needs, of polytheistic teachings and rites, 
well illustrates the parallelism between the stages of 
religious development in a human life and in a people. 
"There are," says Max Muller, "many brahman 
families in which the son is learning by heart word for 
word the old sacred hymns and the father daily per- 
forms his religious duties and sacrifices, while the 
grandfather regards all usages and ceremonies as idle, 
and sees in the Vedic gods only names for what he 
knows to be above all names, and seeks rest, where 
alone it is to be found, in the highest philosophic 



70 The Problem of Cosmology 

knowledge, which to him is at the same time the 
highest religion: Vedanta, the end, the goal, the ful- 
filment of the whole Veda." 

- - . , Sec. 72. Israel's religion was at 

In Judaism and _ ' , , , . 

_, . __ .. first a local henotheism. enovan 

Christianity. „ , J 

was "God ol Israel, wnile, as pre- 
supposed by the first commandment, other gods pre- 
sided over other peoples. How this rude polytheism, 
common to all the early Semites, became enlarged 
into the explicit monotheism of the later prophets, 
history does not make wholly clear. Speculation 
certainly had little part in the change. The impulse 
to progress was mainly practical and moral, prophets 
effecting here what philosophers wrought in Greece. 
The absence of idols — early renounced, apparently 
by Abraham's initiative — led those exalted souls to 
emphasize the moral elements of religion. But right- 
eousness they saw to be in its very nature general, 
not local, wherefore its divine Seat and Defender must 
be universal. Jehovah was thus no longer merely 
"God of Israel" but the "God of all the Earth." 
Not alone the seed of Abraham or those worshiping 
at Jerusalem but the righteous everywhere were his 
people. The way was thus opened for Christianity, 
which presents God's Kingdom as purely spiritual, 
free from all national or geographical limitations. 
This notion of the Supreme Being, so rich in moral 
elements, early church theologians naturally joined 
with that which Greek philosophy had built up. 
Spite of the problem of evil, spite of the metaphysical 
difficulty offered by Plato's "other," church doctrine 
declared God to have created the world out of noth- 
ing. Manicheism and Paulicianism were stamped out 



The Problem of Cosmology 71 

as impiously dualistic and so atheistic. Often as 
dogma or practice might gainsay the teaching named, 
it always maintained itself as the authoritative the- 
ology. From Augustine down the Church's chief 
thinkers agreed in it, while the greatest heretics, 
whether rationalists or mystics, were on this point 
orthodox. 

_ . „ Sec. 73. Spinoza was the first head 

Spinoza and /J . __ 

. .. .„ m Lurope to think Monotheism 

Leibnitz. . , . , . . 

through to its ultimate conclusions, 

cleansing it from the contradictions which theology 
and even Plato and Aristotle had suffered to attach to 
it. Spinoza's exposition leads to the same view as is 
presented in these Chapters, save that he (a) too 
much denies the transcendence of God over nature 
(deus sive natura), and (b) too much ignores differences 
in value among the various forms of being, tending to 
identify reality with perfection. His own age, little 
critical, deemed Spinoza an atheist, whence innumera- 
ble efforts, in the supposed interest of religion, to re- 
fute him. Far the ablest of these was Leibnitz's doc- 
trine of monads, ascribing life and intelligence to all 
matter. But this theory of reality reduces to Spin- 
oza's while not having the simplicity or consistency 
of that. Over the monads, their creator from moment 
to moment and the author of their "preestablished 
harmony," is the one self-subsistent monad, God. 
This sole strictly original being is to all intents and 
purposes the same as Spinoza's substance, while the 
minor monads vary little from Spinoza's " modes," to 
which he, too, assigns a species of relative independ- 
ence. Leibnitz ascribed to Spinoza the assertion of 
a doctrine contrary to the freedom of human volition ; 



72 The Problem of Cosmology 

but here too the philosophers agree, since Spinoza no 
more than Leibnitz teaches mechanical necessity. 

, _ . ._ Sec. 74. Locke's philosophical 

Locke [1632=1704] ' T , , . . , 

, . work was also partly inspired 

, tt . .. by the wish to refute Spinoza. 

Illumination. ^ * 

1 hough grounding all our knowl- 
edge in experience, yet, by admitting that experience 
does not exhaust reality, the Englishman found place 
for faith along with science. Thus, as Leibnitz writes 
de la conformity de la foi avec la raison, Locke proves 
The Reasonableness of Christianity. Unaided reason, 
he says, makes certain (a) the existence of God and 
(b) the immortality of the soul. Of the other religious 
truths, he says, reason demonstrates the possibility, 
though revelation is needful to bring them to our 
knowledge. Owing in Germany mainly to Leibnitz, 
in England and France more to Locke, there grew up 
the natural theology and the rationalistic church the- 
ology of the eighteenth century, the age of "illumina- 
tion." Both exhibited God as a supramundane be- 
ing, who had made the earth and man according to 
purpose and plan and had prescribed them their laws. 
Paleyan teleology was a phase of this movement, in 
which deists as well as theists were involved, the lat- 
ter peculiar only in denying miracle and revelation. 
This superficial mode of belief, slightly modified, re- 
mained till quite recently the basis of nearly all sys- 
tematic theology especially in England and America. 

__ , Sec. 75. Hume's posthumous Dialogues 

Hume and ' J , „ ,. . , „ N , „ ° , 

on Natural Religion (1780) and Kant s 

Kritik der reinen Ver?iunft (1781) may 

be said to have annihilated, for the thoughtful, the 



The Problem of Cosmology 73 

entire fabric of rational theology as it then existed. 
Proceeding empirically, Hume thoroughly demon- 
strated the shortcomings of the teleological proof for 
the divine existence. Whatever idea of this world's 
purpose we may name, he said, be it happiness, cul- 
ture, or the perfection of living beings, innumerable 
facts contradict our supposition. Were we assured 
from other sources that a perfectly wise and good 
Creator existed, we could refer our difficulties to the 
limitation of our knowledge. Having no such ex- 
traneous assurance, we can not do this. We can 
conclude only from what we know, not from what we 
do not know. Over this and neighboring territory 
Kant went even more thoroughly, showing that the 
old grounds for believing in the soul's immortality and 
in God's existence were either utterly invalid, like the 
ontological argument — to which he reduced the cos- 
mological also — or else, like the teleological, quite 
insufficient for demonstration. Hume paused with 
his negative conclusion, only remarking, in Dialogue 
vi, that if driven to choose a cosmological theory he 
should prefer the one which ascribes a principle of 
order to the world as part and parcel of its nature. 
Kant, on the other hand, in his practical philosophy, 
reaches positive ground. The ideas of God, Freedom, 
and Immortality, he argues, though not demonstra- 
ble to the Understanding, become certainties when 
the world is viewed in the light of the facts presented 
by the Practical Reason. These ideas are not usable 
theoretically, to apprehend and explain nature. With 
the notion of God physics has naught to do; with that 
of freedom history has no concern. But nature is not 
reality itself; it is only the complex of possible 



74 The Problem of Cosmology 

phenomena. In and with the conception of Duty we 
are confronted by Reality itself — the absolute world- 
order, to which, by virtue of our practical reason, our 
deepest and proper selves belong. 

_. Sec. 76. The work begun by Luther 

Doom of - ' , . , , & . : . . 

Rationalistic delivering faith from scholasticism, 

Theolojr whose good issue had to await new 

conclusions in physics and in history, 
was completed by Kant's great Critiques. Knowledge 
of nature such as science gives can not be utilized as 
substructure for religious beliefs.* If faith is to remain 
it must have a new basis. This can be found only in 
the facts of the moral world, in the eternally living 
and present fact of men's moral consciousness, wherein 
alone we transcend the order of nature. In this teach- 
ing by Kant the Reformation had its logical result: 
not philological or historical arguments from canonical 
books, not physical or metaphysical speculation, not 
authority, can ground a saving faith. The will for the 
good is the ground for faith in the supremacy of the 
good, viz., in God. The old compromise between 
faith and science thus went by the board, leaving each 
free to develop. Thorough thought at once struck 
into its natural path, to monotheism in the sense 

* "There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous 
wigs could compose Theodicies and when stall-fed officials of an established church 
could prove by the valves in the heart and the round ligament in the hip-joint the 
existence of a 'Moral and intelligent Contriver of the World.' But those times are 
past; and we of the nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our 
mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to wor- 
ship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate expression. 
Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature ; but none the less so all 
we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference — a moral multi- 
verse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe. To such a harlot we owe no 
allegience ; with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion ; and we are 
free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or disobey, and to follow no law 
but that of prudence in coming to terms with such of her particular features as will 
help us to our private ends. If there be a Divine Spirit of the universe, nature, 
such as we know her, can not possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there 
is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there ; and (as 
all higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this world, must 
be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary 
unseen or other world." — W.James, "The Will to Believe," etc., pp. 43, 44. 



The Problem of Cosmology 75 

which these chapters have sought to make clear. God 
alone is; all that exists is and must be embraced in 
Him. The poets, Lessing, Herder, and Goethe led, 
creating a Sturm und Drang which forthwith extended 
from poetry to philosophy. The through and through 
monistic system of Fichte and Hegel resulted, from 
whose principle Lotze, Fechner, and H. Spencer did 
not depart. Poets and philosophers united in reject- 
ing as deistic the old theological and philosophical 
orthodoxy. The fancy of God as a supramundane 
being creating the world and the fulness thereof by a 
preexistent plan and placing it outside himself to run 
like a machine according to nature's laws, was hence- 
forth impossible for thoughtful minds. God is not to 
be conceived as a great master-mechanic or His world 
as a theatre of puppets. * 

Schleiermacher. SeC \ 77 ' W " le F ^ hte J» "P^K 

to those who charged him with 

atheism (1799) came out Schleiermacher's Discourses 
on Religion, expounding for the first time the exact 
religious significance of the new theology. Schleier- 
macher made feeling instead of knowing the source 
and seat of faith — feeling " wherein the finite becomes 
immediately aware of the Infinite and Eternal." He 
taught that every feeling normally arising when the 
spirit confronts nature and human life, such as rever- 
ence, awe, joy, love, gratitude, humility, and worship, 
is religious. Whenever in these experiences the 

*In his Gott, Geniuth und Welt, Goethe says: 

Was war ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse, 
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen Hesse, 
Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 
Natur in sick, sick in Natur zu hegen, 
So dass, was in ihm lebt und webt und ist, 
Nie seine Kraft tmd seinen Geist vergisst. 
The great poet apparently dwelt upon this thought, for the lines also form part 
of his prooemion to his later collection, " Gott und die Welt." 



76 The Problem of Cosmology 

Totality of Creation impresses us as God's revelation, 
so that not a particular and finite thing but God him- 
self seems to enter our life, and so that, too, in our- 
selves, not this or that function but our entire nature, 
the immediately divine in us, is awakened and brought 
out — then the experiences are elements of piety. The 
common idea of God as a special form of being 
outside and behind the world is not necessary to 
religion. That conception is seldom unbiased and 
never sufficient. When it is entertained out of the 
conceit that there must be such a being to render us 
comfort and help, it is not certain to be pious at all. 
Also immortality as many wish this and believe in it 
is not the goal of a religious life. An immortality 
outside or behind time or in time but after the time 
that now is is over, is of little consequence. The 
important immortality is the one which we may have 
here in this temporal life. The attainment of it is our 
proper task day by day. In the midst of finitude to 
become one with the Infinite and to be each moment 
eternal — that is the immortality demanded by religion.* 

* There is no unbelief. 
Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod, 
And waits to see it push away the clod, 

He trusts in God. 
Whoever says, when clouds are in the sky, 
"Be patient, heart, light breaketh by-and-by," 

Trusts the Most High. 
Whoever sees 'neath winter's field of snow 
The silent harvest of the future grow, 

God's power must know. 
Whoever lies down on his couch to sleep, 
Content to lock each sense in slumber deep, 

Knows God will keep. 
Whoever says "To-morrow," "the Unknown," 
"The Future," trusts the power alone 

He dares disown. 
The heart that looketh on when eyelids close, 
And dares to live when life has only woes, 

God's comfort knows. 
There is no unbelief; 

And day by day, and night, unconsciously, 
The heart that lives by faith the lips deny, 

God knoweth why ! 

— Edward Buhver Lytton. 



CHAPTER XII 

Knowledge and Faith 

_ . n - Section 78. Much confusion 

Science Proper and .. , 

_ . . „ . prevails between " science "in 

Science in General. , , , , . 

the strict sense and the work ol 

the intellect in envisaging transcendent realities like 
the objects of faith. For this Kant is mainly respon- 
sible, pretending in his first Kritik to deal with the 
conditions of science, while his second proclaims a 
form of apprehension other than that of science, by 
which we may be sure of God, Freedom, and Immor- 
tality. These, we are told, can not be known but 
only believed in. If so, w r e naturally inquire whether 
our alleged grasp of these ideas has any validity 
whatever; whether in entertaining them we are 
not duped with names. If we have knowledge 
here, why not term it such? If not, why assert any 
apprehension at all? It is important strongly to em- 
phasize the Kantian distinction between the secure, 
exact, limitless knowledge possible in nature, the 
complex of which forms "science" in the narrower 
sense, and the indefinite, wavering and scanty knowl- 
edge attainable in the other realm. Yet it is a contra- 
diction to allege two essentially different kinds or 
orders of mental possessions. If in any case we are 
justified in saying that things exist, it must mean that 
we have knowledge of them more or less exact, com- 
plete, and demonstrable, i. c, more or less scientific. 
The data of sense are confessedly our most conven- 
ient matter for science, having the maximum of exact- 

L 0? C. (77) 



78 The Problem of Cosmology 

ness, detail, and demonstrability; yet in proportion 
as other cognitions bear these marks they too are 
scientific. Certain indemonstrable presuppositions 
being involved in all knowledge, the exactest science 
may be said to comprise a faith element; but the term 
"faith" is more properly applied to our knowledge 
where it is vague as well as undemonstrable and based 
on phenomena of our inner nature. Yet no data are 
valid for faith which are not in some degree valid for 
knowledge. That any facts should be neglected be- 
cause nebulous, science itself forbids. Most that are 
now definite were once the reverse. With this para- 
graph compare Sees. 45, 47, and 56. 

Sec. 79. Every general philosophy, i. e., 
every one which purports to be a theory 

_ .. " of the world and of life, involves an 

Rationem. , . _ . , . . . 

element 01 taith in a sense in which 

strict science does not involve such. Philosophy 
undertakes to put meaning into things, or rather to 
unveil the meaning already in them; and the assump- 
tion of such a meaning never springs from the 
philosopher's mental nature alone but to a great 
extent from his moral and esthetic being. What he 
as a man feels to be the highest good and the ultimate 
goal, that he sees in the world as its good and goal, 
construing all reality accordingly. His ideal, his con- 
viction of what ought to be, is his impulse and guiding 
light in surveying the universe. It is as a man with 
such and such needs and wishes and not merely as 
an intellectual being, that every philosopher tries to 
interpret. What impresses him as weighty and 
worthy he exalts as the essential, nay, as the sole final 
reality. This truth, perfectly obvious in case of all 



The Problem of Cosmology 79 

the idealists from Plato down, fits Kant, Schopen- 
hauer, Comte, and the materialists as well. Moreover, 
the need to which the philosopher makes the universe 
answer is always at bottom moral. Our philosophy 
inevitably bears the impress of our moral as well as 
of our mental nature, and our view is no more likely 
to be vitiated by this fact than it is by pure cog- 
nition through the categories of space, time, and 
cause. Be the danger here greater or less, it is 
unavoidable. Philosophy is a human affair: as human 
beings we could neither have nor tolerate any other. 

_. . _ Sec. 80. The objection that this 

This Tendency ,, , . . r . 

^ . ,. stubborn determination to find a 

not a Prejudice. , 

moral meaning in reality is only a 

prejudice, to be eliminated like any other, is not well 
taken.* It no more involves prejudice than does the 
determination, whence all scientific striving precedes, 
to find a mental meaning in reality. The two pro- 
pensities are part of one and the same intellectual 
bent. As already stated (Sec. 57), man's moral nature 
with its implications is valid part of reality, no less 
objective than that which bases physical phenomena. 
Even in material science research seems to be in last 
analysis grounded on or inspired by belief in the uni- 
verse as somehow morally meant. Desire to explore 
being as such never led any investigator far. On the 
other hand inclination to limit the universe or our 
possible knowledge of it to the simple, clear, and 
definite data presented by the sense-world, is cer- 
tainly a prejudice and a dangerous one. Hume's ad- 
monition that we can conclude only from what we 

♦See note to Sec. 45. 



80 The Problem of Cosmology 

know, is of course to be heeded, but it offers no reason 

for ignoring facts simply because they are as yet 

obscure. 

_ .. Sec. 8i. Too much must not be 

Further , . . , . . 

« made 01 the admission that the 

Misapprehension. . . . 

existence of a spiritual world and 

a living God can not be demonstrated, and that these 
and such verities are apprehended primarily in feeling 
and afterwards as matters of faith. Musical harmonies 
and all esthetic facts are in the first instance felt, not 
cognized mentally; yet music at least is found to have 
a mental and even a mathematical basis. Objective 
demonstration, in the strict sense, is nowhere possible. 
We demonstrate only when certain premises are ad- 
mitted. Unless it is agreed that general reality is so 
and so we can not demonstrate that particular facts 
are so and so. Proof, too, which is less stringent than 
demonstration, always regards a certain totality or 
considerable compass of truth. To prove is in no 
case aught but so setting forth the facts in question 
as to make man's total knowledge the most harmon- 
ious. Now what is asserted is that (i) while the 
material universe studied by science in its more usual 
application offers and can offer no reason for doubting 
the existence of things beyond its sphere, (2) an un- 
prejudiced survey of all known reality, including man's 
moral nature with its aspirations and needs, renders 
the telic, esthetic, moral, inclusive theory of reality 
not only more reasonable than any smaller view but 
the only reasonable or admissible assumption. Yet 
(3) as our vision of the supersensible first dawns in 
the domain of feeling and at present lacks definition 
in detail, susceptible of being held in various ways 



The Problem of Cosmology 



and subject in detail to all vagaries, surmises and 
illusions, it may well, for distinction's sake, be termed 
faith instead of knowledge proper. 

WT . ,. Sec. 82. The distinction which 

Understanding „ , , TT , 

- _ Kant draws between Understand- 

and Reason. , _ . . t . . ,, 

ing and Reason, while in itseli ten- 
able and not without propriety, is another source of 
constant confusion and mistake. Thus Paulsen's 
statement* that "the understanding is indifferent to 
the problem whether the world is good or bad" might 
naturally be taken as a denial of all evidence that the 
objects of faith are real. Neither Paulsen nor Kant 
means this. Both recognize ample evidence of the 
sort in question, but make men's Reason the organ 
for apprehending it. If this contrast of Reason with 
Understanding is adhered to, it should be borne in 
mind that Reason as well as Understanding is a valid 
instrument for the prehension of Truth. No umbrage 
is cast upon data by denominating them "ideas of the 
reason." If well founded, though possibly indefinite, 
they constitute information of an order as certain as 
that which the products of the understanding afford. 
Indeed, were it possible for data from the one depart- 
ment of knowledge to contradict those from the other, 
the facts avouched by reason would have the logical 
precedence. 

hk j • r» • a.- Sec. 83. It derogates nothing 

Moods in Relation , , ° , ° 

D .. . from the verity of the rational 

to Belief. J . 

ideas that they impress us more 

or less strongly somewhat according to our moods. 
When time and sense most nearly suffice, permanent 



Einleitung in die Philosophic, p. 335 [Thilly's Tr. p. 325]. 



82 The Problem of Cosmology 

realities seem vapid and far. Though special fortune 
often evokes gratitude to the Power above, adversity 
and distress are the chief quickeners of reverent 
thought. Weariness of the world works in the same 
way. When we find that life does not redeem its 
promises, that men are mean, false, selfseeking, and 
merciless, that to succeed here below you must call 
the little great, the sham genuine, and appearance 
reality, the heart-wrenching disillusionment drives us 
to hope for a world of more righteous judgments and 
awards. Few lives, and no great ones, are spared 
this bitterness. You strove for earthly good: gold, 
honor, position, prosperity, and enjoyment, and you 
found like thousands before you that these objects 
can not satisfy the heart. You let imposing things 
deceive you; beauty and truth you sought to gain by 
chasing them ; and now after many a long and devious 
race you are undeceived and in despair. Once you 
marched forth to fight for right and freedom, but you 
grew weary, yielded, and made your peace with the 
world. This disillusionment, too, impels one to long 
for a higher life, for redemption from such vanity, 
woe, and death. Existence seems illusory and cruel 
and the weary soul cries with Goethe: 

Ceaseless ache ! inane endeavor ! 

What boots all the fierce unrest ! 
Peace like a river, 

Come, oh come and fill my breast ! 

Sec. 84. It is the nebulousness at- 
taching to the data of faith which, 
considering the great value of such 
faith, renders important religious organization with 
its ordinances and creeds. Isolation in religious 



The Problem of Cos?nology 83 

thought impairs the steadfastness of faith. Shut up to 
his own meditations the most philosophic believer 
will at times fear that his convictions are but vagaries. 
Not only our own whims and arbitrary judgments are 
a danger, but also those of shallow but dogmatic pub- 
lic opinion. Communal religious life organized about 
the great religious truths dear to pious mankind is the 
sole antidote. The old creeds in which countless 
generations of the faithful have to their comfort read 
the meaning of life, place before us what is firm, 
abiding and eternal amid the changes of human 
opinion. Theories, doctrines and systems come and 
pass away as the clouds do, but those hoary symbols 
remain like the stars, though at moments hidden as 
the clouds sweep past. Best to serve faith and life 
a creed must be: 1. Historical. A new religion is, 
strictly speaking, impossible. If such could and did 
exist it would be useless. 2. General. Creeds too 
definite or detailed, whether originally so or made so 
by contemporary interpretation, divide minds instead 
of uniting them and lead to persecution. What 
strengthens one in the hour of need is not the faith of 
scholars as such but the faith of good men as such. 
The two often differ widely. 3. Of Transcendent 
Content. An abstract or rational religion, or a creed 
limited, like Comte's, to the present results of 
" science," with no word touching absolute or eternal 
verities, would be the scorn of all earnest minds. 



Aug 3 I901 



JUL 29 1901 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Sept. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
{724)779-2111 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 192 736 8 



; 



[Sgjigg . 

mm 

mm 

M 

I 



111 



pESS ; 






